911 Tape Key to Conviction in Beating : Court: Boyfriend gets a one-year term. Prosecutors pressed on even though woman recanted her initial story.

A North Hollywood man has been convicted of beating his girlfriend after prosecutors used a recording of her 911 call for help to counter her denials at the trial that she had been abused.

After jurors heard the 911 tape, Koeppel Hall, 25, an unemployed laborer, was convicted of battery. He was sentenced Tuesday to the maximum of one year in jail by a Van Nuys Municipal Court judge.

The case points up the vigorous approach that prosecutors can pursue in domestic violence cases: It doesn’t matter if the victim recants a story, or even if the victim refuses to press charges. Prosecutors press ahead.

“Our policy is to prosecute these cases to the utmost, regardless of the cooperativity or uncooperativity of the victim,” said Deputy City Atty. George A. Schell, who prosecuted Hall.

Hall was found guilty of slapping, scratching and beating his girlfriend, now 22, April 23. City Atty. James Hahn said Wednesday that he instituted the policy because prosecutors routinely encounter victims who change their stories when the time comes to go to court, often under pressure from an intimidating or sweet-talking defendant.

The policy, he said, means that the victim, typically a wife or girlfriend, does not have the final say-so on whether to drop charges. Prosecutors do.

And if prosecutors take the case to court, he said, the victim’s role is transformed. She is a witness, albeit an important one, whose prior statements to police or to 911 dispatchers can be offered to jurors.

Sometimes, Schell said, the policy puts the prosecutor in the uncomfortable role of making the victim’s courtroom testimony out to be lies.

But, Hahn said, “This way, we’re able to demonstrate to jury when she was telling the truth. Was it the night of the offense, when she called 911? Or is it in court, where he’s looking at her directly across from counsel table and she’s saying what he wants to hear?”

Just after midnight on April 23, Hall--whose nickname, according to court files, is “Little Insane”--became angry, the woman told Los Angeles police.

Hall, an ex-convict released from state prison in November, 1992, after doing about five years for manslaughter, slapped her on the face and neck, the woman told police. He pulled her hair and, she said, he pushed her so hard that she hit her back on a bed frame.

She fled their apartment, ducked under a fence, found a phone at an apartment complex down the block and dialed 911.

During the three-minute call, the woman cried frequently. She pleaded for paramedics and between sobs, she said: “My boyfriend of mine just jumped on me. My back is bruised bad. My face is bruised.”

Minutes later, officers spotted Hall at a convenience store at Vineland Avenue and Victory Boulevard, and arrested him. Officers noted long scratches on the woman’s neck and back.

Two days later, the woman’s story had changed. She told an LAPD officer following up the arrest that there had been no attack. She sometimes had scary “flashbacks,” she said, and she had been scratched when Hall tried to calm her.

When she came to court, she and Hall were seen hugging and kissing in the hallway. They were reportedly so affectionate, Judge Gregg Marcus said, that he told them to cool it.

On the stand, the woman stuck to the “flashbacks” story, Schell said. “But on the 911 tape it was apparent that her main emotion was fear,” he said.

Hall’s attorney, Deputy Public Defender Susan G. Poehls, could not be reached Wednesday for comment.

The trial took six days. The jury deliberated for two more before finding Hall guilty of misdemeanor battery.

Marcus imposed the maximum one-year term on Tuesday. “If it warrants it,” he said Wednesday in an interview in chambers, “I give it.”