A lawyer for a man who claims Denver police beat him without cause told a jury Monday that the City engaged in a pattern of covering-up police brutality during opening arguments in a trial at U.S. District Court in Denver.

Nick Lynch, 28, filed a federal suit after police arrested him following a fight outside Pat’s Downtown Bar on Market Street near the 16th Street Mall in March 2008. Lynch claims that even when there is significant circumstantial evidence of unreasonable force, the city will not discipline officers.

Lynch and two friends were waiting in line to get into the bar when a dispute with Justin Henkenburns and a woman he was with erupted in a brawl, said his lawyer, Robert Liechty.

The fight was over within a minute and Lynch and his two friends headed toward their car, followed by Henkenburns and the woman, who threw her high heels at them. When Lynch and his party saw Henkenburns stop and point them out to a police officer near 20th and Larimer streets, they fled and Lynch jumped a fence and hid behind some bushes.

Lynch ran because he had been charged with assault in Golden two years earlier, and the plea agreement he reached in that case called for him to stay out of trouble, Liechty said. He feared that another assault charge would result in jail time.

The officers spotted him and a number of them climbed the fence. Though he rose from the bushes with his hands raised they threw him to the ground and at least one of them began clubbing him with a baton, Liechty said.

Liechty showed the jury a picture of Lynch’s leg that he said was taken the following day. An angry bruise covered the rear of the left thigh from just above the knee to a few inches below the buttocks.

Liechty pointed to a half-dozen spots that he called welts.

“We believe the evidence will show these welts are evidence of separate strikes by a baton,” Liechty said.

It was dark and the officers faces were shadowed so he was unable to identify who hit him, Lichety said. As a result, Judge John Kane, who heard an earlier lawsuit that Lynch filed against four officers and the city over the incident, threw the case out.

The charge against Lynch was dropped when neither the officers nor Henkenburns came to a court hearing, Liechty said.

However, Assistant City Attorney Wendy Shea said that after Lynch was booked for assaulting Henkenburns a nurse at the jail asked if he had any injuries. “He said ‘no.’ Had he said he was, there would have been an investigation.”

Instead he waited for more than seven months to file a complaint with Denver’s Office of Independent Monitor, which oversees investigations into police misconduct, Shea said.

By the time the Internal Affairs unit investigated, the officers had been involved in hundreds of other arrests and couldn’t remember details of Lynch’s arrest, though all denied he was beaten, she said.

His charges against the officers weren’t sustained because there was insufficient evidence and he couldn’t identify the officers involved, Shea said.

Lynch filed an appeal of Kane’s decision with the Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals, saying that the cops, Adam Barrett, Stephen Kenfield and Michael Morelock violated his constitutional right to court access by refusing to disclose who exercised excessive force against him. Officer Abbegayle Dorn was also named in the suit.

He also claimed that the city violated his right to court access by adopting a policy and practice that precipitated the “conspiracy of silence” waged against him, according to the appeals court decision sending the case back to the district court for further hearing.

“The district court concluded plaintiff raised genuine issues of material fact for trial on his …. claim against defendant city,” the Appeals court said in the decision.

But the three-judge Appellate panel said since he unsuccessfully litigated his claim against the officers his opportunity to recover damages on that claim has passed.

They also ruled the officers were entitled to qualified immunity because “at least in the Tenth Circuit, the question of whether an evidentiary cover-up by police officials may violate an individual’s constitutional right to court access was not clearly established at the time of the alleged violation.”

However, they said there was no reason to prevent Lynch’s claim against the city from proceeding.

Tom McGhee: 303-954-1671, tmcghee@denverpost.com or twitter.com/dpmcghee