NEWS ANALYSIS : King Jurors Searching for the Man Behind the Symbol : Justice: Evaluation of his character will be a key to setting damages for the beating that changed his life.

The federal court jurors now deliberating Rodney King’s lawsuit against the city of Los Angeles are grappling with a question to which few before them have found an answer: Who is Rodney Glen King?

For three years, he has been a one-dimensional symbol, a lightning rod, an icon for competing visions of social justice and crime and punishment.

Although this is the third time the King beating has been brought before a jury, it is the first time that King, the man, has occupied center stage. During the first two trials--the first of which ignited the 1992 riots--the officers involved in the Lake View Terrace beating held the spotlight. In those trials, much of King’s history was deemed irrelevant to the conduct of the officers and thus inadmissible.

But this time, the seven-woman, three-man jury is being asked to extrapolate, in the most minute ways, how the beating changed one of the most famous, and infamous, men in the city’s history.

“Legally speaking, Rodney King’s character is not directly relevant to the question of what actual injuries he suffered,” said UCLA law professor Peter Arenella, who has followed the case. “Pragmatically speaking, the jury’s evaluation of his character will be a central issue in their deliberations.”

King’s attorneys have portrayed him during the relatively low-key proceedings as an involuntary civil rights symbol, forced forever to carry the emotional and physical scars from his beating by four Los Angeles Police Department officers on March 3, 1991.

According to King and his experts, he still suffers flashbacks, dizziness, blurred vision and numbness on the right side of his face, where cosmetic surgery was needed to repair multiple fractures. Although King is struggling to turn his life around, it has been impossible for him to resume work as a construction laborer, his lawyers said during the three-week trial.

Lawyers for the city, however, countered that the problems King says he now suffers have been in the making since his childhood. For that reason, they contend, King should receive only a small fraction of the $15 million he wants.

The city has not contested the fact the officers did, in fact, injure King. But, because of his troubled past, they have asked the jury to award him $800,000, or about four times his medical expenses--an amount more closely suited to a personal injury case.

To advance its contention, the city dug deep into King’s past, offering the public a rare--if sketchy--look into his life.

In elementary school, according to testimony, his teachers noted that he was aggressive at times and had difficulty learning. As a juvenile, he was convicted of hitting someone with a pipe. And he was on parole for a robbery conviction when he led police on a high-speed chase that ended in his beating.

Since the beating, the jury was told, he has tested positive for drugs and has had several run-ins with the law, including a family dispute, a drunk driving conviction and an arrest with a transvestite prostitute in Hollywood. He also faces a lawsuit for failure to pay child support.

When medical tests indicated that King may have suffered brain damage from blows to the head, the city’s experts suggested that the injuries were caused by alcohol abuse. After King’s experts said his injuries prevented him from learning a skilled trade, defense experts said those options would have been limited anyway by his low IQ and third- to fourth-grade reading level.

The city was prepared to delve even further into King’s background, but U.S. District Judge John G. Davies put a stop to it, saying essentially that enough is enough.

“The objective here was not to beat up on King,” said Skip Miller, a private attorney hired by the city as co-counsel on the case. “We just wanted to illustrate that there was a certain pattern to his life that existed before the beating.”

In the courtroom, throughout the city’s foray into his past, King sat expressionless, rarely showing any emotion. Occasionally, he would shake his head, or rest his hands over his eyes when the videotape of the incident was shown.

King testified that he draws strength from the words of his father, who used to tell him not to be weak, never to show pain.

King’s attorneys compared the city’s aggressive approach to blaming a rape victim for the crime. By hammering away at King’s character, they said, the city was seeking to divert the jury’s attention away from the issue of police brutality.

“Mr. King has warts, but the warts are not on trial here,” said John Burris, one of King’s attorneys. “He may have an IQ of 86, but he still has a right to a life . . . to be the best he can be with what he has. . . . He’s still entitled to the protection of the Bill of Rights.”

Compounding King’s injuries, Burris said, is the fact that his client is reminded of the beating almost every time he ventures into public. Because of death threats, he wears a bulletproof vest and is accompanied by security guards--even to his son’s Little League games. At home, his attorneys said, he lives behind closed window shades in a house that is patrolled by dogs and monitored by cameras.

In the end, this third group of jurors, who have now deliberated for two days, are being asked to look beyond the videotape, beyond the arguing lawyers and into the life of a man none of them will ever really know.