Volatile Claims Launch NYPD Assault Trial

In fiery opening arguments for a trial that has put the city on edge, federal prosecutors charged Tuesday that five white police officers viciously beat a Haitian immigrant while he was in custody, and then sodomized him with a broken broom handle in the bathroom of a Brooklyn police station.

Calling the alleged 1997 attack on Abner Louima “cruel,” “unspeakable” and “humiliating,” prosecutors said they had ample evidence to prove the officers had violated the security guard’s civil rights. But in a sensational courtroom twist, an attorney for one of the officers charged that Louima lied about the incident, and suggested that his traumatic internal injuries came from having consensual sex with another man.

Marvin Kornberg, a veteran lawyer who has defended many policemen, said tests would show that Louima’s fecal matter contained the DNA of another man. “There’s 150 million reasons to cut the truth, to modify, to in fact lie,” he said, referring to Louima’s multimillion-dollar civil lawsuit against the city. “And it’s an outrageous thing.”

Yet it’s not the only case of suspected police misconduct riveting New Yorkers. As the Louima trial begins, the city is still agonizing over the killing of Amadou Diallo, an unarmed black street vendor, who was shot 41 times in February by a special unit of four white police officers.

The two cases overlap in striking ways: Both the Diallo and Louima families have retained the “dream team” of Johnnie L. Cochran Jr., Barry Sheck and Peter Neufeld to represent them in civil cases against the city, and the Rev. Al Sharpton, who has made a career of agitating for black civil rights, has organized massive street protests on behalf of both families.

Firing back for the defense, attorney Stephen Worth, who represents one of the five officers in the Louima case, blasted Republican Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani in court Tuesday, saying he had turned the policemen into scapegoats in the wake of the Aug. 9, 1997, inciden--four months before his reelection.

Many New York political officials rushed to judgment without hearing all the facts, added Worth, who also represents a defendant in the Diallo case. “So these officers were swept up and thrown to the mob. The media convicted them long ago.”

For his part, Giuliani’s office has criticized the timing of a U.S. Department of Justice probe into the New York police as politically motivate--suggesting that Hillary Rodham Clinton, who may run against Giuliani next year for the U.S. Senate seat from New York, is pulling strings behind the scenes. New York Atty. Gen. Eliott Spitzer is also investigating the department.

The Louima case stunned New Yorkers the moment it burst into the headlines. In a Pulitzer Prize-winning series of Daily News columns, the late Mike McAlary interviewed key players in the case and concluded: “Be afraid, be very afraid if this story is true, and I’m afraid it is.”

Meanwhile, Sharpton held angry protest marches and Giulian--a longtime police all--formed a special citizens’ commission to investigate the beleaguered department. But he later spurned many of its key recommendations, reiterating his opposition to a fully independent city commission that would monitor complaints of police abuse.

“I can’t recall a time when you had two such immense cases of police misconduct unfolding at the same moment in a big city,” said Paul Chevigny, an NYU law professor who has written extensively about police violence. “And the Louima case is almost without precedent. . . . It’s like something you’d hear about in a Third World dictatorship, not in a Brooklyn precinct house. If true, it’s shocking behavior.”

There is no videotape of the fracas that erupted outside a Brooklyn nightclub 21 months ago on a hot summer night, a disturbance that put Louima and five cops on a collision course. Prosecutors believe the enraged policemen who arrested him were seeking revenge because they falsely believed he had punched one of them in the face. There are no filmed excerpts of the moment when the married father of two said his attackers walked him into a bathroom and sodomized him, before ramming the broom in his mouth and cursing him with racial epithets.

Yet even without video evidence of the actual incident, it has been burned into the minds of New Yorkers. Millions saw TV images of a frail, beleaguered Louima, barely able to sit up on a hospital bed in the days after the alleged attack.

Even before the trial began Tuesday, jurors in the Louima case couldn’t help but make comparisons to the Rodney G. King trial in Simi Valley, Calif.; eight of the 12 told the court in pretrial screening interviews that they feared angry protests and worse could fill the streets of New York if the accused officers were not convicted.

“There’s tremendous distraction here for everyone, including jurors, but I think in the end, this case will come down to very basic evidence,” said Gerard Lynch, a Columbia University law professor and former federal prosecutor. “Did this appalling event really happen? And who’s responsible?”

On the first day, both sides claimed the evidence was on their side, yet there were holes in each case. Prosecutors said they had found leather gloves that Officer John Volpe allegedly wore during the encounter with Louima, and that Louima’s DNA was found on them. But they have only been able to find a small part of the handle that was allegedly used to assault him.

Defense attorneys vowed to attack Louima’s credibility, saying he had lied to investigators about key details. For example, Louima has retracted an earlier statement he made that police officers sneered, “It’s Giuliani time” as they allegedly brutalized him. But the defense may have trouble explaining how he came to be so seriously injured.

The defendants sought unsuccessfully to have their cases tried individually. If convicted, two officers charged with beating Louima and a third accused of covering up the incident face up to 10 years in prison; the two accused of torturing him could get life in prison.

As the long-awaited trial finally started, Kornberg, the defense attorney, found the only common ground, telling an army of pursuing reporters: “This is going to be a very long, very intense trial.”

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Times researcher Lisa Meyer contributed to this story.