QUIET START TO TRIAL IN POLICE BRUTALITY CASE

A decade ago, during jury selection in the case of the police
officers accused of torturing Abner Louima, thousands of people
marched across the Brooklyn Bridge to protest abuses by the police.

In 2007, outside a courthouse in Queens, New Black Panthers and
police union members made up the cast of vocal partisans watching the
trial of the officers who fatally shot Sean Bell.

But on Wednesday, as the case involving accusations of cruel force by
the police against a man named Michael Mineo got under way, the only
commotion outside the courthouse came from traffic or officers
directing visitors.

Inside State Supreme Court in Brooklyn, Justice Alan D. Marrus
pondered whether he could move the trial to a smaller courtroom for
opening statements on Thursday.

"I want to see how many people show up tomorrow," he decided.

The quiet start to the trial masked explosive charges. Prosecutors
say that a group of officers tackled Mr. Mineo, then 24, on a
platform at the Prospect Park subway station 15 months ago.

The authorities contend that one of the officers, Richard Kern,
repeatedly shoved a retractable baton between Mr. Mineo's buttocks,
then told Mr. Mineo that if he revealed the attack to anyone or went
to the hospital, he would be charged with a felony. Two other
officers, Alex Cruz and Andrew Morales, helped to cover up the
attack, prosecutors charge.

Officer Kern, who was 25 at the time, was charged with aggravated
sexual abuse and faces up to 25 years in prison if convicted.
Officers Cruz and Morales, both 26 at the time, were charged with
hindering prosecution and official misconduct. The three officers
were placed on modified assignments and their guns were taken away.

Lawyers for the three officers said that their clients were not
guilty. In court, they plan to argue that the attack never happened
and that Mr. Mineo's injuries could have stemmed from a previous infection.

But prosecutors plan to present DNA evidence from Officer Kern's
baton that they say came from Mr. Mineo, who was hospitalized with a
torn rectum that became abscessed and had to be surgically drained.

While the criminal case will focus narrowly on the events of that day
in 2008, Mr. Mineo has filed a federal civil rights lawsuit against
the city. His lawyer contended that the Police Department had been
"negligent in training, hiring and supervising" the officers
involved. The suit seeks $220 million in damages.

Despite the brutality of the accusations -- and their echo of
previous events, like the 1997 sodomy of Mr. Louima in a Brooklyn
station house -- and despite early attention, Mr. Mineo's case has
not sparked the same kind of public protest, or changes of protocol
within the department.

Among the reasons, experts said, is the fact that race is not a
factor -- Officer Kern is white, Officers Cruz and Morales are
Hispanic, and Mr. Mineo is white and Hispanic. In addition, other
officers ultimately came forward to corroborate Mr. Mineo's account,
blunting charges of a "blue wall of silence."

"There's been a lot of pretrial publicity," said John D. Patten, a
lawyer for Officer Kern. "A lot of it is falling off."

Against that backdrop, prosecutors will attempt the most difficult of
tasks: convicting police officers. And in a trial expected to stretch
less than a month, both sides will try to draw sharp lines through
the cloudy events of Oct. 15, 2008.

Those events played out in full public view. That day, Mr. Mineo, who
was working as a body piercer at the time, was smoking a marijuana
cigarette with a friend near the Prospect Park station, the
authorities said. Upon seeing Officers Kern and Morales in an
unmarked car, Mr. Mineo threw away the cigarette and fled into the
station, the authorities said.

Several officers tackled Mr. Mineo and handcuffed him. Then,
according to prosecutors, at least one witness saw Officer Kern shove
the baton between Mr. Mineo's buttocks over and over, ripping his
underwear and the skin beneath, causing him to bleed.

Mr. Mineo screamed about his injuries as he was led away, witnesses
told the authorities; when Officer Kern asked him if he was injured,
prosecutors say, Mr. Mineo reached into his pants and showed his
bloodied hands.

It took more than a week before Mr. Mineo's accusations became
public. They emerged with a torrent of other information, including
early denials by the Police Department that Mr. Mineo had been
attacked, corroboration of Mr. Mineo's story by a transit officer and
then other details about the lives of two men at the center of the case.

Officer Kern, a skinny native of Woodside, Queens, looks more like a
teenager. He had been accused of excessive force twice before, but
his lawyer said he was cleared in both cases. One of the cases
prompted lawsuits that the city settled for $50,000.

Mr. Mineo, gangly and tall, had a history of mostly minor brushes
with the law. After what friends called an itinerant childhood and
adolescence -- both of his parents are dead -- Mr. Mineo worked at a
tattoo parlor in Downtown Brooklyn.

Defense lawyers have promised a rigorous questioning of Mr. Mineo's
credibility. "Not just his background, his drug use and his criminal
history," said Stuart London, who represents Mr. Cruz. "There are
internal inconsistencies not only in his statements, but also
compared to what eyewitnesses and other officers say."

There will also be arguments over Mr. Mineo's medical records. David
Rudovsky, who teaches law at the University of Pennsylvania and
specializes in police misconduct cases, said the discussion of
medical records would be critical. "If the prosecutor is able to show
to a high degree of certainty that the injuries could have only come
about the way the complainant describes them, then they've made a lot
of ground," he said.

The lawyers for the officers have indicated that they will argue that
Mr. Mineo's injuries were caused by a previous, unrelated infection.
On Wednesday, Mr. Mineo's lawyers scoffed at that idea. "I have never
seen a human being in such pain, mental and physical, in my whole
life," said Kevin L. Mosley, one of the lawyers.