MARTINEZ, Calif. — Murder defendant Susan Polk pleaded for the prosecutor to treat her son, Eli Polk, with compassion during a second day of tense cross-examination, with Polk accusing the judge and the prosecutor of working in concert to defame her son.

"This is unfair treatment," Polk cried out Friday morning, when Assistant District Attorney Paul Sequeira questioned the 20-year-old witness about his criminal record as a juvenile and an adult.

"Shame on you both!" Polk said, claiming the prosecutor was engaging in "tricky, nefarious and devious" behavior.

"I fully recognize that watching your son be cross-examined has got to be extremely difficult," Judge Laurel Brady told the defendant, while noting that nothing about Sequeira's cross-examination was improper.

The prosecutor completed his cross-examination of Eli Friday afternoon and the witness will return to court Monday for redirect examination from his mother.

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Polk, 48, is defending herself at trial against the first-degree murder of her 70-year-old psychologist husband, Dr. Frank "Felix" Polk. She began her case April 24 and expects to complete it by May 11.

Prosecutors say Polk willfully stabbed her husband to death with a paring knife in October 2002 at the end of a nasty divorce battle. But she claims she acted in self-defense after her husband attacked her first.

Eli, the only one of her three sons to testify in her defense, has testified that she was a loving and devoted wife and mother who endured years of physical and mental abuse from his father.

Polk's direct examination of Eli was cut short Thursday when she repeatedly argued with the judge.

On Friday, she continued to lodge a series of objections — roughly one per minute in the morning session — the vast majority of which were denied.

"Does he have any manners whatsoever? Any kindness, any compassion?" Polk pleaded.

"I have all those things," prosecutor Sequeira commented. "Just ask my kids."

During his cross-examination, Sequeira used the defendant's own diary journals, Eli's juvenile records and police reports, and family correspondence to try to impeach not only Eli's character, but also his characterization of his relationship with his mother as loving and warm.

"I may have spoken against my mom at times," Eli remarked, "the few times I sided with my dad."

"My mom's awesome," Eli maintained, while conceding, with a grin, that she was sometimes argumentative: "I think my mom has a big mouth."

Eli is the third of Polk's children to testify at her trial. Gabriel Polk, 19, and Adam Polk, 23, were confident witnesses for the prosecution; they were dismissive of their mother's claims of abuse, and accused her of creating drama and controversy at every turn.

Eli, by contrast, appears less sure of himself on the stand. He is polite and direct, but often seems afraid and apprehensive.

He is currently in custody for a misdemeanor battery charge — an incident involving a girlfriend — as well as allegedly violating both a restraining order and probation for a 2003 conviction stemming from a police chase.

His trial, originally set for May 2, was moved to May 16 to accommodate his testimony in his mother's case.

Discovery skirmish

Eli was 17 and in juvenile detention in October 2002 when he learned his father had been killed.

Sequeira probed the witness about why he has characterized the juvenile battery conviction, which led to his nine-month sentence, as simply "a fistfight." Witnesses told police, Sequeira noted, that Eli used a flashlight to strike the victim.

Eli said he used his fists, not a flashlight.

"I hit him four or five times," Eli said of his victim, an 18-year old named Justin Richardson, whom his mother has characterized in court as a "known bully" who engaged in "gang-style" violence.

"You broke his nose and cut his face up pretty good, didn't you?" Sequeira asked the witness.

"I object," Polk said. "He's attempting to inject hearsay information that hasn't even been established."

"Would you like to see the medical records?" Sequeira replied.

Sequeira poked through papers on his desk for the next minute, leading the defendant to exclaim: "He doesn't even have them!"

But when a copy of the medical report was finally handed to her, Polk called for a sidebar and asked that the prosecutor be dismissed with prejudice, based on his failure to comply with discovery. She claimed she had never seen the report.

"He's attempting to confuse and mislead the jury," Polk said of the prosecutor's line of questioning. "When the most important part of this young man's testimony is that his father was violent, and that his father threatened to kill me."

Her motion was denied.

Eli was also asked about a felony conviction, stemming from a police chase on Oct. 14, 2003, a year to the day his mother was arrested on suspicion of his father's murder.

According to court documents, Eli fled police in his Camaro at a top speed of 130 mph, and was caught when a tire blew out. Deputies noted that he smelled of marijuana and the back of his mouth was green.

Eli denied he was speeding and claimed he pulled over willingly.

"I was between homes. Things were going very badly. I made some mistakes," he said.

'It's called a typo'

The prosecutor claims that Eli is under his mother's control and influence and he suggested Friday that her son has lied to the court, and past courts, in order to protect his mother.

Sequeira projected onto a screen a copy of Eli's April 2002 declaration to a divorce court, written before his father's death.

The statement, in which Eli praises his mother and calls his father a "terrible person," was read into the record during direct examination.

Eli said he wrote it himself without his mother's prompting. But the prosecutor pointed out a small grammatical detail that appeared to throw the witness off guard.

Sequeira noted that the document is written entirely in the first person, except for a passage at the bottom of the first page that states in part: "I realize now, but especially after the whole, releasing Eli to father's custody in Alameda."

"I see that," Eli said defensively. "It's called a typo."

"Did someone forget to change that to an 'I' after it was prepared?" Sequeira asked.

"I don't know," Eli said, appearing flustered by the accusation that his mother engineered the letter. "That's ridiculous. This is ridiculous. I'm not going to"

"You don't want to answer that, do you?"

"I don't," Eli said.

He also asked Eli to read from a letter he wrote his mother while she was in prison, in which he told her, "I would die for you, Mom, I would do absolutely anything to get you out of there."

Eli agreed that he loved his mother unconditionally, saying that she gave him back his self-esteem, despite her own alleged suffering through a lifetime of abuse.

"You'd love her even if she was guilty?" Sequeira asked.

"No, I wouldn't," Eli replied. "If I believed my mom slaughtered my father, it would certainly change things."

Sequeira referred to the passage in Eli's letter and asked: "Lying is a lot easier than dying, isn't that true?"

"Yes, that's true," Eli said, nodding. "But you're taking what I said out of context."