A prediction: Mike Tyson’s rape conviction will be reversed on appeal.

It certainly should be. The trial judge denied Tyson a fair trial by unjustifiably excluding important defense evidence, including testimony that would (if true) have shown Tyson’s accuser lied when she denied necking in his limousine.

Judge Patricia Gifford may also have violated due process in using Indiana’s rape shield law to bar evidence of a possible motive for Tyson’s accuser to fabricate the rape charge.

And the judge erred egregiously in refusing to tell the jury that the prosecution must prove that Tyson did not reasonably believe that Desiree Washington had consented to sex.

These flaws in Tyson’s trial in Marion County Superior Court, in Indianapolis, were so palpable that on the merits, at least, this date-rape appeal should be like shooting fish in a barrel.

So please, when the Feb. 10 conviction is reversed, spare us another self-promoting movie a la "Reversal of Fortune" about Harvard law Professor Alan Dershowitz (Tyson’s new lawyer) brilliantly riding to the rescue.’

And conversely, if the Indiana courts prove unwilling to correct this clear injustice, let’s not blame Dershowitz. This appeal will turn on the quality of the judging, not of the lawyering.

That’s not to say Tyson is innocent, or Washington is lying. He has a long, ugly history of brutal conduct towards women, and the excluded evidence doesn’t prove he did not rape the 18-year-old beauty contestant. It just casts grave doubt on the credibility of the only witness who says he did.

Tyson is entitled to a new trial at which the jury gets to hear all the relevant evidence and gets a proper instruction on the prosecution’s burden of proving criminal intent.

Judge Gifford’s most glaring error was her decision to prevent Carla Martin, a witness who came forward during the trial, from telling the jury what she had told the lawyers:

Minutes before the alleged rape in Tyson’s hotel bedroom about 2 a.m. last July 19, Martin saw two people "all over" each other hugging and kissing in the back of a limousine as it eased into the hotel driveway and parked. Then Tyson and a woman emerged, touched, and walked into the hotel.

Judge Gifford also barred testimony by two other women who had been with Martin that night and would have corroborated her: Pamela Lawrence, who recalled Martin saying that the two people in the back of the limo were all over each other; and Renee Neal, who recalled seeing them enter the hotel holding hands.

The three said they had not come forward sooner on the advice of Martin’s aunt, a lawyer, who told them that the case was going nowhere anyway.

Their accounts directly contradicted Washington’s testimony that at no point had she embraced Tyson or encouraged any physical intimacies during their date, which began when he picked her up in the limo about 1:45 a.m. and ended more than hour later when she emerged from-his hotel bedroom.

Why did Judge Gifford exclude such important, if suspiciously last-minute, witnesses?

Significantly, neither the judge nor the prosecution even hinted at the natural suspicion harbored by many who lack detailed knowledge of the facts: that these three women had teen suborned by Tyson’s friends or someone else to commit perjury.

The prosecution did suggest that Tyson’s lead-trial counsel, Vincent Fuller of Washington’s Williams & Connolly, was lying about when he had first learned of the new witnesses-a charge for which there was not a shred of evidence and which Fuller indignantly denied.

But the judge made no such finding of bad faith. Rather, she gave a hodgepodge of reasons for excluding the witnesses that seemed to boil down to pique at Fuller and his partners for waiting two days before telling her about them.

She also hinted at a suspicion that Williams & Connolly was trying to trick her into "some kind of reversible error."

Not very good reasons for denying critical evidence to a man facing the stigma of a rape conviction and years behind bars.

Defense lawyers, on the other hand, gave perfectly plausible reasons for their delay in notifying the prosecution and the judge that new witnesses had come forward: They wanted to check them out to see if they weren’t crank callers.

Even if they erred in not notifying the judge and prosecution sooner, Fuller and his partner Lane Heard argued convincingly, this did no harm to the trial’s truth-seeking function.

Judge Gifford disagreed, lamely. She credited prosecution complaints that the delay had somehow "prejudiced" its case, and suggested that, in any event, the three women’s information was not very important because it would be "cumulative" with other evidence such as Tyson’s own testimony about necking in the limo.

Prejudice? Hogwash. While the prosecution complained mightily about not being told of the three women before it had put on its key witnesses. Washington and the limo driver, they did not identify a single question they might have asked differently had they known.

Washington and the limo driver were locked into the detailed accounts they had previously given to the grand jury and in depositions. As defense lawyers argued, "the evidence from the new witnesses could not have affected Ms. Washington’s substantive testimony; it merely casts doubt upon the truth of it."

The prosecutors also complained that the possible need to put witnesses who had already testified back on the stand to rebut the new Witness would be "awkward, and it destroys what rhythm we’ve able to build up."

"Rhythm"? Big deal. A man’s liberty is at stake here. Even more preposterous was Judge Gifford’s suggestion that this testimony would have been merely "cumulative."

To the contrary, a jury would be far more likely to believe Tyson’s account about intimacies in the limo after hearing the same thing from an apparently neutral bystander.

Indeed, the prosecution itself admitted what an important witness Carla Martin would be when it told Judge Gifford on Feb. 4 that Martin’s account was such "damning evidence" and "pivotal information" that its "impact on the jury … is basically beyond words."

The other piece of excluded evidence remains shielded from the view of the press and public under Indiana’s rape shield law. But the vague outlines disclosed in court papers suggest the makings of an interesting test case.

The defense has listed as a major appeal point Judge Gifford’s "denial of defense counsel’s motion to allow use of evidence of the violence that existed in the complainant’s household."

Hmmmm. The court papers don’t tell us what that’s all about. Dershowitz says he can’t. But one can speculate. How might violence in the Washington household be inadmissible? The rape shield law presumably came into play to suppress evidence about Washington’s prior sexual activity.

How might such evidence be relevant to the defense? Well, Washington had become concerned that she might have gotten venereal disease from Tyson. When she asked her parents to take her to the hospital, the defense might contend, perhaps she had a particular reason to fear a violent reaction if she told them her concern about venereal disease stemmed from consensual sex.

Tyson’s strongest appeal point of all could be the judge’s refusal to give the jury the defense’s proposed instruction that the prosecution must prove not only lack of consent by Washington, but also "that the defendant did not reasonably believe that she had consented."

It is a fundamental tenet of the criminal law that a jury must find criminal intent beyond a reasonable doubt to convict a defendant of any serious crime. That includes rape, gonzo feminists notwithstanding.

The prosecution argues that there was no conceivable scenario in which Tyson could mistakenly have believed that Washington had consented, given her account of a brutal, unambiguous rape and his account of mutually zestful sexual acrobatics.

But "a properly instructed jury might well have concluded that the truth about what took place at the Canterbury Hotel that night lay somewhere between Washington’s inculpatory account and Tyson’s exculpatory account," as defense lawyers have argued in court papers.

Suppose they both lied. Suppose, for example, that, contrary to Washington’s account (but consistent with Carla Martin’s), Washington engaged in vigorous sexual foreplay with Tyson, but then faintly murmured no when he pushed beyond foreplay.

Any juror speculating along these lines could have been misled by Judge Gifford into convicting on the ground that Washington had not intended to consent, even if Tyson had not known this.

Meanwhile, Tyson sits in jail, perhaps guilty, but invalidly convicted.