Bad police work cited in rape verdict

A 29-year-old Lawrence man was found not guilty Friday of raping a woman in 2003 at her Baldwin apartment, ending a case one juror said was characterized by “horrible” police work by the Baldwin Police Department.

“There were things that they never investigated. There was evidence that they never had tested,” juror Leo Beier said. “The fact that the chief went to the preliminary hearing without even having his report filled out … it was really sloppy and mishandled.”

Baldwin Police Chief Mike McKenna, the lead investigator in the case, said that despite the verdict, he stood by his department’s work and the 46-year-old woman in the case.

The woman told police that on July 13, 2003, the defendant and his 27-year-old brother raped her after she met them at a Baldwin bar and let them come to her apartment to drink beer. The defendant acknowledged being at the apartment but claimed he and his brother left without incident after the woman became hysterical.

There was no DNA evidence pointing to the defendant. Dist. Atty. Christine Kenney said she thought her office could prove the case based on the victim’s testimony, bruises on her arms and face, and the fact she ran to a neighbor in distress to call police.

“We have to make the best we can out of the investigation we’re given,” Kenney said. “Obviously there were things that weren’t looked at. Whether or not those things would have changed the outcome of the case, I don’t know.”

Defense attorney Greg Robinson was just as critical of Kenney as he was of police. Robinson said that given the problems with the investigation and the lack of physical evidence, Kenney’s office never should have taken the case to trial.

After the four-and-a-half-day trial, the jury of seven women and five men deliberated for less than three hours before coming back with the not-guilty verdict.

Problems cited with the investigation include:

  • Pieces of potentially useful physical evidence, such as scrapings from under the woman’s fingernails and a hair found on her during a sexual-assault exam, were never tested in a crime lab, Robinson said.
  • Police didn’t test the woman’s blood for drugs or intoxicants. The defense had the blood tested and found she had a blood-alcohol level of 0.223, combined with traces of a sedative, several hours after the incident. The legal point of intoxication in Kansas is 0.08.
  • Some items at the crime scene appeared to have been moved in between photos taken by police, Beier said.

Robinson said police and prosecutors didn’t challenge the woman’s story and acted as “social workers,” not investigators.

“That’s an absurd comment,” Kenney said.

Beier, the juror, said one major factor that swayed jurors was that the defendant was alleged to have assaulted the woman after his brother had done so. Beier said that based on the evidence he saw, the injuries could have been caused by the first assailant.

The brother is scheduled to stand trial in October. The Journal-World does not identify people charged with sex crimes unless they’ve been convicted, nor does it identify victims of sex crimes.

“We all had sympathy for the complainant. It would appear, given her testimony and her demeanor, that something terrible had happened,” Beier said. “But given the evidence that the D.A. had to work with, there was no way to be sure that assailant number two was responsible for any of it.”