LOS ANGELES, Jan. 6 – Five air conditioners set high in the windows of the white-walled courtroom work ceaselessly, humming a background to the words of Charles Manson’s attorney.

Irving A. Kanarek stands behind a lectern, placed between the court railing and the counsel table, perhaps 6 to 8 feet from the jury box.

In the box and overflowing both ends, the 12 regular jurors and five alternates sit like statues in various poses. Only their eyes seem to move as they gaze impassively at the short, chunky lawyer.

They have been sequestered at the Ambassador since July. They didn’t go home for Thanksgiving, Christmas or New Year’s Day.

The Tate-LaBianca murder trial, now nearly seven months old, is in the final stage of the first phase — reaching verdicts of guilty or innocent. The penalty trial remains, if any of the defendants are convicted.

What are the jurors thinking as Kanarek cites Page 12,982 and reads testimony from it into the ever-growing 20,000-page trial transcript?

He started his final argument three days before New Year’s Day — a court holiday — and is expected to continue at least until Thursday.

The audience of spectators is small. The sheriff’s deputies assigned to searching those who enter the courtroom haven’t much to do.

Superior Judge Charles H. Older, sitting black-robed and watchful in a high-backed chair at the raised bench, is appropriately solemn most of the time.

But sometimes there is a hint of a suppressed smile of private amusement. Sometimes he rubs his eyes.

The defendants are not present. They were removed to listen to the trial by loudspeaker because they repeatedly disrupted sessions.

The young women, Susan Atkins, 22, Patricia Krenwinkel, 22, and Leslie Van Houten, 20, are sitting in a hallway outside the jury room, through a door and up a flight of stairs behind Older.

Manson is in a holding room at the left side of the courtroom.

Occasionally, a figure can be glimpsed pacing back and forth before the grillework in the door. There is evidently a sheriff’s deputy in the room, too — probably put there the other day when Manson called to his attorney:

“Why don’t you sit down? You’re just making things worse.”

Kanarek smiled, then continued.

Like other defense attorneys, Kanarek rested his client’s case without offering a defense. But, he has attacked the state’s case through its witnesses and exhibits in final argument.

Kanarek charges that the prosecution is “hell bent” to convict Manson because the cultist represents confrontations in the nation today. He claims the trial is “political” and a “lynching.”

He suggests that:

— The prosecution has “programmed” witnesses to produce prejudicial testimony.

— It is not “inconceivable” that the .22-caliber pistol identified as one of the murder weapons is a “fraud.”

— It is “almost unbelievable” that a camera crew from KABC-TV discovered clothing supposedly worn by the Tate killers. He asked whether it was “a publicity stunt.”

And, he returned again and again to the ghastly photographs of the murder victims.

“We might as well face the prejudice here,” he told jurors. “You’re going to see them in the jury room.

“If we’re going to face facts in the jury room, let’s face facts here.”

He has spoken slowly, pausing for moments as he tried to find another bit of testimony marked with yellow strips of paper in the volumes of transcript.

Heads nod as the monotone continues above the background hum, but there is a freshet of horror when Kanarek produces another color picture of a victim.

“Now we come to an unpleasant aspect,” he said Tuesday, his fourth full day of argument. “The coroner’s pictures.

“Whether it is, good trial strategy or not…”

He did not finish the sentence. As he held up one of the pictures, a woman juror in the front row averted her eyes.

By JOHN KENDALL