Smith Acquitted of Rape Charge After Brief Deliberation by Jury

After deliberating for 77 minutes, a jury acquitted William K. Smith today of charges that he raped a woman at the Kennedy family's Palm Beach estate one moonlit night last Easter weekend.

The jury returned its verdict at 5:10 P.M., giving startlingly short shrift to the pleas they heard from the prosecutor, Moira K. Lasch, in her final argument barely two hours before. Waiting to hear the jurors' decision, Mr. Smith clasped his hands and bowed his head, as if in prayer, as Judge Mary E. Lupo warned that she wanted no histrionics or any "public expression" from anyone upon the reading of the verdict. Grinning Broadly

The judge meant what she said. When the court clerk, Deborah Allen, announced that the jury had cleared Mr. Smith on both counts, of sexual battery and battery, the defendant smiled, jumped up, and hugged his chief defense lawyer, Roy E. Black of Miami, and the judge cried: "Excuse me, Mr. Black! Excuse me!"

The two sat down, and Mr. Smith, who had faced a maximum sentence of up to 15 years, grinned broadly and looked around the courtroom while the judge delivered a 15-minute oration thanking all who had taken part in the trial and remarking on the surprising ease with which a jury had been found to hear the sensational case.

To Mr. Smith, the judge said, "You are released from all responsibilities concerning this case, and your cash bond is discharged."

Forty-five minutes later, after accepting congratulations from court buffs and dashing down corridors to elude reporters, Mr. Smith ambled up for the last time to the bank of microphones stationed in front of the Palm Beach County courthouse. 'An Enormous Debt'

His face bathed in television lights and bleached by the strobes of flash cameras, his voice cracking at times, he thanked his mother, his family, his lawyers, his jury consultants, and the jurors themselves.

"My life was in their hands and I'm so grateful for the job they did and the seriousness with which they took it," he said, as his mother, Jean Kennedy Smith, a sister to Senator Edward M. Kennedy of Massachusetts, stood at his side, looking still stunned and stressed. "I have an enormous debt to the system and to God and I have a terrific faith in both of them. And I'm just really, really happy. So we'll see you guys later."

Taking their cue from the judge, who once referred to reporters as "barracudas," most of the members of the four-woman, two-man jury refused to talk to reporters tonight.

But Lea Haller, a 37-year-old cosmetics executive, was quoted by The Associated Press as saying that the condition of the dress the woman wore the night of the incident, lacking tears or stains, was an important factor in her decision.

"The dress was an issue for me, no evidence on the dress," she said. Mr. Black had argued that the dress showed Mr. Smith's accuser was not raped. Emotions of Jurors

After the verdict was read, several jurors reacted with emotion. The foreman, Thomas Stearns Jr., who collected seven Purple Hearts in Vietnam, wiped his eyes, as did at least two other jurors. Judge Mary E. Lupo's law secretary and the court reporter beamed.

The prosecutor, Moira K. Lasch, remained expressionless, writing intently on a yellow legal pad as she had almost from the moment court reconvened just after 5 P.M. She left the courthouse without comment.

A family spokesman said that Mr. Smith would begin his medical residency next month at the University of New Mexico hospital in Albuquerque.

Mr. Smith's 30-year-old accuser was not available for comment. Her lawyer, David Roth of West Palm Beach, read a statement from her in which she, too, offered thanks to her supporters. 'I Have Contributed'

"Despite the enormous personal price, I do not for one moment regret the course of action I have pursued," the statement said. "I pray that my decision to proceed was not in vain, and that in some small way I have contributed to a reasoned consideration of the critical issues this case has raised."

Afterward, Mr. Roth read a statement of his own. "The jury has spoken, and we, as well as our client, respect its labors and enormously difficult decision. However, a not guilty verdict does not equate to innocence."

The rape counselor who helped the accuser the day of the incident told the A.P., "I believed her then, and I believe her today."

The counselor, Denny Abbott, said the woman had watched Mr. Smith's testimony Tuesday. "She didn't expect him to tell the same story she did," he told the A.P., "but she was a little taken aback at the story he told."

He said the woman was "tough." "She's strong," he said. "She'll take care of herself." Stunning Rebuke

The jury's decision was a stunning rebuke to Mrs. Lasch and the Palm Beach County State Attorney's office, which spent eight months and hundreds of thousands of dollars prosecuting Mr. Smith, the 31-year-old nephew of a President and two Senators and the cousin of a congressman.

Offering an amalgam of sex, the dynamics of date rape, Palm Beach society and the personal foibles of America's most famous family, the case attracted international interest and gavel-to-gavel television coverage. The trial's graphic testimony reached millions of homes.

The verdict came with the lightning speed that characterized the trial. Judge Lupo, in setting a trial date of Dec. 2, had pledged to get jurors finished and home by Dec. 20. She easily beat that goal by running a Saturday and Sunday court session, paring each side's witness lists and ruling instantly on motions.

One evening last week, after a full day of testimony by the accuser ended at 10 minutes to 6, the courtroom filled with the expectant sounds of people preparing to leave -- until the judge declared that 10 more minutes remained, so 10 minutes of work would be done. The next witness was called.

The deliberations may also have been speeded by Florida's practice of seating 6 jurors, rather than 12, for felony cases.

The verdict came so swiftly today that Mr. Smith and his legal team had to backtrack from the Kennedy estate almost as soon as they arrived. It marked an almost instantaneous end to the prolonged ordeal that began in the early morning hours of March 30, shortly after Mr. Smith met the woman at a Palm Beach night club called Au Bar.

The woman asserted that Mr. Smith used his charm and even the knowledge he had picked up in medical school to lure her to his family's estate before tackling her on the lawn and raping her.

In 10 days of testimony, the two sides called 45 witnesses. There was testimony on grains of sand and blades of grass, as well as experts on meteorology, clothing analysis, and penile penetration.

There were the obscure, like bartenders and parking valets, and famous, like Senator Kennedy, whose desire to go out after what he described as a somber evening of family reminiscences set the whole odyssey in motion. And there were the two antagonists. Affecting Testimony

Both to the handful of people sitting in Judge Lupo's courtroom and the millions who saw her only as a figure behind an gray electronic circle, the testimony of the woman, the single mother of a 2-year-old, was deeply affecting. But there were numerous inconsistencies and gaps in her account, which she had described and redescribed to rape counselors, policemen, lawyers and, most recently, jurors.

Very much in contrast was Mr. Smith's immaculately airtight version of events, which he gave for the first time on Tuesday. He depicted the woman as sexually aggressive, hysterical and, ultimately, unreliable. Both he and his lawyer acknowledged that Mr. Smith had intercourse with the woman, and that he had treated her caddishly and callously afterwards.

But the outcome of the case hinged on more than the testimony of the main players.

Mr. Smith won an important victory before the first witness was called, when Judge Lupo barred prosecutors from introducing testimony of three women -- two graduate students and a doctor -- who came forward after the Florida woman surfaced to say that Mr. Smith had either assaulted them or attempted to do so.

In general, testimony about a defendant's prior criminal behavior or allegations like those made by the three women may not be heard by a jury. Different Techniques

Then there were the lawyers themselves. To some extent, there was a disparity of resources: two civil servants versus four respected private practitioners headed by Mr. Black, the man many regard as the finest criminal defense lawyer on the fertile legal territory of southern Florida. Mr. Smith retained Cathy Bennett, the nation's premier jury consultant, and spent tens of thousands of dollars on experts and exhibits.

Looming even larger than that, however, was the disparity in technique and, some said, talent. Mrs. Lasch tried her case in precisely the way she composed and delivered her closing statement Tuesday: long on detail, short on indignation.

Still, in the eyes of many, the prosecutor's closing argument represented one of her more effective moments in this case. She tried to demonstrate that the events of the evening could not have occurred at the leisurely pace described by prosecution witnesses. There was not time enough for the gradual buildup to consensual sex that Mr. Smith described, she said.

"She didn't know this man," Mrs. Lasch said. "She didn't even have an opportunity to know him."

And of the defendant's central assertion, the prosecutor said: "He tries to tell you that this woman rubbed up against him and relentlessly pursued him in the bar, only to find out she's not even using birth control. Is that really believable? Is it?"

She added, "This woman's had a child. She's a high-risk pregnancy. If she was going to have consensual sex on March 30, 1991, she would use birth control." Not 'Preposterous'

Mr. Black, by comparison, burnished his reputation as a lawyer with a sophisticated legal mind beneath a veneer of the Everyman.

In his closing statement, he called on jurors to draw on "general, human common sense," in reaching their conclusions about the behavior of both Mr. Smith and his accuser. Mrs. Lasch's vision of relations between the sexes, he suggested, was limited and unrealistic.

"She keeps making the point that it's spring break in Florida, and it's preposterous that a man and a woman would get together after knowing each other for a couple of hours and have sex," he said. On the contrary, he said, it would not be at all unusual for "two young people" to have sex, especially on a moonlit night on a secluded beach and later with a large walled estate that afforded them privacy.

He ridiculed the prosecutor's assertion that it was hard for her to accept Mr. Smith's testimony that he would choose to have sex with a woman under Mrs. Smith's bedroom window. "What's the other side of that coin?" he asked. "What they want us to believe is that this young man goes up there and rapes a screaming woman under the open windows not only of his mother, but his sister, two prosecutors from New York, and the father of one of them, who is a former special agent for the F.B.I.

"They want you to believe that he ran across that lawn, tackled that woman, who was screaming at the top of her lungs under those open windows, and rapes her."

After the verdict, the two Kennedy men who accompanied Mr. Smith to the nightclub on the night of the incident made statements. Both had been called by the prosecution to testify, and both did so Friday.

In Rhode Island, where he is a state legislator, Mr. Smith's cousin Patrick Kennedy said: "This has been a very difficult time for my family. I believed in my cousin Willie's innocence all along. The jury's swift verdict will now allow Willie and all of us to get on with our lives."

And Senator Kennedy, spoke to reporters briefly outside the John F. Kennedy Federal Building in downtown Boston. Over the months, as his nephew was first named as a suspect, then arrested, the brought to trial, Senator Kennedy had been widely viewed as having suffered considerable political damage.

Aside from the question of Mr. Smith's guilt or innocence, the Senator was criticized, even ridiculed, for waking the two young men and persuading them to accompany him to the bar that evening.

Tonight the Senator said: "I'm gratified by the verdict. I'd always believed that after all the facts were in, that Will would be found innocent."

And he added, "If there's anything good that has come out of this whole long experience, it's the renewed closeness of our family and friends."