King stays unshaken by grilling in court

HE IS slow-speaking, uncertain and willing to admit that he has lied. But Rodney King, the man whose beating caused racial turmoil in the US, yesterday stood by his version of the night he encountered baton-wielding Los Angeles police officers.

It was his second day in the witness box in a federal court, where he has provided a graphic account of his beating for the first time in open court. After hours of cross- examination, he remained unshaken by attempts to undermine his story - an account which has enraptured a city still recovering from last year's riots.

Lawyers representing the officers, charged with violating Mr King's civil rights, have tried to portray Mr King as an aggressive convict on parole for robbery - a semi-monster whom the officers (wrongly) thought had taken a strength-enhancing drug before he was stopped after a car chase, kicked and repeatedly beaten.

But he has emerged as deferential, tentative and so polite that he is almost a caricature from a different age, the downtrodden black who never forgets to call his white oppressors 'sir'. He has admitted lying by telling police he did not take marijuana - he now says he did - and drink-driving. But, he said earlier, during the beating he was 'just trying to stay alive, sir, trying to stay alive'.

The 'sir' is important because the case's racial undertones have taken on a new depth. Mr King said on Tuesday that he was taunted during the beating - chants of 'What's up, killer? . . . What's up, nigger?' . He later said he was not certain whether he heard the word 'nigger'.

Mr King has made a similar claim before and then retreated from it. Yesterday he said he first denied the racial slurs because his mother, a devout Jehovah's Witness, asked him not to play up the racial aspects of the case. The prosecution does not have to prove racial motivation to win, but they must show that the officers intended to use excessive force. The suggestion of a race attack may bolster this.

The mystique of Mr King, a former labourer who was jailed for robbing a Korean shopkeeper, is partly because he has so rarely been seen in the year since the officers' acquittal on almost every charge sparked the worst urban riots for decades. He has been in hiding, besieged by the media and embroiled in a row within his own family about his legal representation.

One of the principle participants in the running commentary is Michael Stone, the attorney representing Laurence Powell, the officer who struck most of the baton blows. At the end of Mr King's first day of testimony, Mr Stone arrived before the array of television cameras outside the court where he delicately picked apart his testimony, painting him as a convincing but deceitful gold-digger intent on winning multi-million dollar civil damages.