Sometimes Accusers Lie

I was asked to defend the man accused of kidnapping and rape.

His former girlfriend had accused him.

He was no angel. In fact, he was not only a convicted felon already. He had only the year before been released from prison. If convicted of these charges, he would be sent back there for the rest of his life.

I read the police report. This is what she said happened:

We got into an argument at child support court. He didn’t want to pay. We argued in the elevator, and he got loud and angry. When we were right next to the metal detector on the first floor, he yelled and threatened me. I walked right across the hall to the domestic violence clerk’s office, and applied for a restraining order.

I took my child home, put him in the house, and walked out through the garage to the mailbox by the end of my driveway. When I came back into the garage, he was hiding there, and he grabbed me. He dragged me back into my house. He put me up on the kitchen counter, on the island. He held a gun on me; a pistol. In my own kitchen, he raped me.

I expected the man to claim she consented. He surprised me with a defense that seemed doomed to fail.

Here’s what he said happened:

I was never even there.

Inside, I groaned. Mistaken identity? The jury will never believe that. No, somebody’s lying.

It is the duty of the jury to presume that this man was innocent. If he was, then the woman had to be lying.

I began to investigate her claims.

She had claimed that the argument began at the courthouse. It was loud, she had said. It was by the metal detectors, she had said.

I asked the courthouse security officers to pull all of the security videos from the courthouse from that day. Let’s see if they looked like they’d been arguing. After viewing carefully every video, I was surprised, but not by what I had seen. Instead, by what I had not seen.

My client was not on film anywhere. Not from any camera. Zip. Nada. Zilch.

His accuser was nowhere to be seen, either. Hmmm.

My next stop was the domestic violence clerk’s office. By the way, it was not across the hall from the metal detectors. In fact, it was not even in the same building. It was in the building next door to the courthouse, and that building had no metal detectors.

The DV clerks searched their records, and found no record of her applying for a restraining order. Not that day. Not ever. Hmmm.

Next, I check the child support records. Funny thing. He was not in court on the day she had claimed. Neither was she. The child support case she had filed against him had not been in court for six months! And even then, he wasn’t there, because he had never been served with papers. There was no indication that he even knew a child support case had been filed.

I think I now knew who the liar was.

I went back to the police reports. Was there any physical evidence? No. Easy stuff first. His fingerprints were not found in her home or garage. No physical evidence was found where she claimed the attack happened. There was no physical evidence discovered by any nurse or doctor.

The truth seemed clear to me. I went to see the prosecutor, a veteran trial lawyer herself. I carefully went over everything I had found, and everything I had sought and not found. I expected the prosecutor, whose obligation was to do justice, to tell me she was dismissing the charges.

Not exactly. Instead, she said, I am not going to be the one to tell this woman she wasn’t raped. Let the jury tell her.

My client was forced to trust a jury of six strangers, none of them his peers, to see the truth for what it was. He had no one on his side but me.

This time, having me on his side, and the truth I brought with me, was enough.

Accusers sometimes lie. I never prosecute. I defend.