Glengoyne
12-19-2003, 05:02 PM
No more Jury duty! I am free to post like I used to. Well at least once I catch up on my piled up work.
Long and the short of it. The defendant was charged with the rape of a 50 something year old woman with a degenerative neurological condition(terminal) in a rest home. He was a Certified Nursing Assistant that was supposed to be caring for her. We found him guilty of 'rape of an incompetant person', Sexual battery of an institutionalized person, and elder abuse. We had a mis-trial(hung jury) on the count of forcible rape. We were split 7-5, leaning toward 'not guilty' on that charge.
Among the more lurid details were that his responsibilities for caring for the victim included changing her diaper, feeding her, and occasionally cleaning up the feces she had pulled from her diaper and smeared on the wall and other various places. There was testimony that she had asked a number of employees, both male and female, to have sex with her. It was our belief that while she might have been able to ask for sex, she certainly wasn't able to grasp all that the act entailed. On top of that we had to conclude that the defendant should have been aware of her deficits. In my mind, that wasn't even a close call. For several jurors her "solicitations"(cringe) were quite mitigating. We argued for two days before eventually persuading them that she was incompetent. Well, more correctly, two days of requesting the proper bits of physician testimony that persuaded them that she was indeed incapable of giving 'legal consent'.
Whew. Back to work and happy to be here. I have been away almost a month.
Long and the short of it. The defendant was charged with the rape of a 50 something year old woman with a degenerative neurological condition(terminal) in a rest home. He was a Certified Nursing Assistant that was supposed to be caring for her. We found him guilty of 'rape of an incompetant person', Sexual battery of an institutionalized person, and elder abuse. We had a mis-trial(hung jury) on the count of forcible rape. We were split 7-5, leaning toward 'not guilty' on that charge.
Among the more lurid details were that his responsibilities for caring for the victim included changing her diaper, feeding her, and occasionally cleaning up the feces she had pulled from her diaper and smeared on the wall and other various places. There was testimony that she had asked a number of employees, both male and female, to have sex with her. It was our belief that while she might have been able to ask for sex, she certainly wasn't able to grasp all that the act entailed. On top of that we had to conclude that the defendant should have been aware of her deficits. In my mind, that wasn't even a close call. For several jurors her "solicitations"(cringe) were quite mitigating. We argued for two days before eventually persuading them that she was incompetent. Well, more correctly, two days of requesting the proper bits of physician testimony that persuaded them that she was indeed incapable of giving 'legal consent'.
Whew. Back to work and happy to be here. I have been away almost a month.