Kansas City, Mo. ? A man who was freed from Kansas’ sexual predator program last year after a ruling by the U.S. Supreme Court has been found guilty of raping a woman in an apartment complex parking lot.

Michael T. Crane, 43, of Blue Springs, was found guilty Thursday of forcible rape, kidnapping, third-degree assault and three counts of forcible sodomy. He could be sentenced to multiple life terms for the March 22, 2003, attack in an east Kansas City, Mo., apartment complex.

Crane raped the woman a little more than a year after doctors at Larned State Hospital declared him no longer a threat. He had been convicted in 1994 in Johnson County, Kan., for a 1993 attack on a video store clerk and sentenced to 10 years in prison. In 1998 a Johnson County jury found him to be a sexually violent predator, which meant he could be held indefinitely for mental treatment.

He was held until January 2002 in the sexual predator program, which was the model for about 20 other states that created similar laws. The law allows indefinite confinement of violent sex offenders beyond their prison term if they suffer from mental abnormalities that make them likely to commit similar crimes in the future.

But the Supreme Court ruled in January 2002 that inmates could be held after their sentences end only if the state could prove they had “serious difficulty controlling their behavior.”

A state expert had found that Crane could control his acts but chose not to.

Crane was released three days after that ruling.

Crane tried to convince the Jackson County jury this week that he had consensual sex with the 39-year-old woman he was accused of raping. He testified that he had met the woman at a restaurant at 4:30 a.m.

Assistant Jackson County prosecutor Ted Hunt called Crane’s defense “desperate,” adding that it’s highly unlikely a man and a woman would have consensual sex in a parking lot after exchanging no more than five sentences.