L.A. Won’t Contest Liability in King Beating : Litigation: Officials hope the strategy will reduce legal fees and avoid renewed trauma over the 1991 incident. Months of negotiations have yielded no settlement.

The Los Angeles City Council voted Wednesday to concede that the city is liable for damages suffered by Rodney G. King and to let a jury decide how much it should pay.

City officials said their strategy is designed both to reduce legal fees in the civil case and to spare the city another traumatic re-examination of the 1991 beating of King by Los Angeles police.

In a motion to be filed today, the city will ask U.S. District Judge John G. Davies to jump immediately to the question of how much King should be paid for medical expenses, emotional distress and lost wages.

King filed suit against the city and the officers involved in 1991. He initially asked for $57 million--a million dollars for each blow allegedly landed by the officers.

Months of negotiations have failed to produce a settlement. At the last public airing of the matter, in September, King’s attorney was demanding $9.5 million and the City Council had offered $1.25 million.

With negotiations at a standstill and the trial set to begin March 22, the City Council decided that it wants a jury to decide the final award.

“It’s a way to compensate Mr. King expeditiously and to get the matter over for the city. The city does not want to spend week upon week discussing the issue again,” said City Councilman Zev Yaroslavsky. “Everybody benefits from this.”

King’s attorney, Milton Grimes, was in court and could not be reached for comment.

Davies must decide whether to accept the city’s motion and allow the trial to proceed immediately to the damages phase. Under such an approach, the city would agree to pay all of King’s direct expenses, said Skip Miller, the attorney representing the city.

City Atty. James K. Hahn said punitive damages could still be assessed against the individual Los Angeles police officers named in the suit--Laurence M. Powell, Theodore J. Briseno and Timothy E. Wind and their supervisor, Sgt. Stacey C. Koon. That question could be determined in a separate portion of the civil trial or in yet another trial.

Loyola Law School professor Laurie Levenson said the city’s admission of liability may be a strategy to focus the civil trial on King, rather than the police officers’ actions.

“If you just go to the damages issue, the focus will be much more on Rodney King,” said Levenson, who was a regular follower of the federal criminal trial of the officers. “And the city has always felt that would be a less sympathetic situation for him before a jury.”

Steve Lerman, a lawyer who used to represent King and who still represents the estate of a man who was in King’s car on the night of the beating, concurred. Once the city concedes its liability, Lerman said, lawyers for King and the other plaintiffs will not be able to introduce evidence that shows the city’s negligence for the conduct of its officers.

Instead, Lerman added, most of the evidence will focus on King and the injuries he suffered as a result of the beating. King, who was kicked and struck repeatedly with police batons, received more than a dozen facial fractures, including a fractured eye socket, as well as a broken right leg and numerous scrapes and bruises.

City officials insisted that their intent is to cut down on both the emotional and financial costs of the case, which would be the third trial directly related to the King beating. Besides high legal fees, council members have been concerned that the city might have to call a costly police alert in anticipation of the verdict, like the one called at the end of last year’s federal criminal trial of the four officers.

Acquittals in the 1992 state court trials of the four officers touched off the worst rioting in modern U.S. history. When the four were retried last year in federal court, Koon and Powell were convicted of violating King’s civil rights and sent to prison.

The City Council voted unanimously Wednesday in a closed-door session on its most recent strategy. In the past, council members have disagreed sharply on how to proceed in the King case.

The city’s last offer included an initial $250,000 payment and a $1-million annuity guaranteeing King $75,000 a year for life.

But some council members had said that they might pay even less if they left the case to a jury--where King’s four brushes with the law following his beating might work against him. King was arrested in all four incidents, but he was charged only in the last, for allegedly driving drunk when he crashed into a curb.

At the time, Yaroslavsky and council President John Ferraro wrote a letter to Hahn suggesting that the city consider withdrawing its settlement offer.

But council members Mark Ridley-Thomas, Nate Holden, Rita Walters and Mike Hernandez argued that the settlement was too small and that more should be offered, in part to avoid another trial.

Koon’s lawyer said he was “gratified” that the city’s position, if accepted by the judge, would assure that Koon and the other officers do not have to pay King’s compensatory damages.

But attorney Ira Salzman said he has “serious misgivings” about the action as well. Salzman said the motion is an apparent attempt to limit a discussion of police training and orders that led to the officers’ actions on the night of the beating.

Even if King wins punitive damages, several observers said, he might have a hard time collecting. All four officers have reported that they have no assets after spending all of their savings to defend themselves in the two criminal trials.