Wrapping up the R. Kelly acquittal
The Chicago Tribune takes a look back and decides the verdict came from what everyone’s been saying all week: The prosecution didn’t have a victim:
One paramount lesson to take away from the failed child pornography prosecution of R&B star R. Kelly is this: It’s hard to win a conviction when the alleged victim not only denies it but also doesn’t show up in court.
“Child exploitation cases are usually difficult to defend,” said Paul DerOhannesian, a New York lawyer who is an expert on criminal cases involving the sexual assault of children. “But the lack of a [complaining] victim here was a major weakness that drained the case of emotion.”
There’s another thread here as well:
[…] Kelly’s gold-plated defense team had the resources and skill to put off the trial for years, and legal analysts say that delay may have sapped the potential to provoke juror outrage.
“Time was his friend,” said Andrea Zopp, the former Cook County prosecutor….
It was thought, in the Tribune as elsewhere, that the extraordinary six-year delay in the case was due to the trouble the state had in coming up with something to base the case on, absent the girl they thought was on the tape, who as the story said not only wouldn’t testify, but told police and a grand jury that it wasn’t she.*
It seems that in the end the state’s strategy was to base the case on the production of child porn, rather than statutory rape, which in a way took the victim out of it. You have to give Cook County credit: The case ultimately included a friend of both Kelly’s and the girl’s who could testify to having had three-way sex with the pair—and having been filmed doing it. But that gambit, obviously, didn’t work.
Meanwhile, the Sun-Times goes back to canvas the reactions of some of the witnesses at the trial—particularly those who were friends of the girl in question and ID’ed her in court:
Tjada Burnett, a family friend of the alleged victim who also testified against Kelly, said she “can’t understand” the verdict.
Burnett said she had spoken Friday night with Sparkle, the alleged victim’s aunt who introduced her to Kelly when she was just 12.
Sparkle “was very, very upset,” Burnett said.
Bennie Edwards Sr., the alleged victim’s uncle, who also testified for the state, described Kelly’s acquittal as “B.S.”
“How can the jury let a pedophile go like that?” he asked.
Though he too is estranged from his niece, he said: “She’s gotta be hurting right now.”
Kelly, he predicted, will “get what he’s got coming.”
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* Based on the testimony of other people at the trial, the chances are good that the woman was lying to the police and perjuring herself before the grand jury, and that the three relatives of hers who testified at the trial committed perjury as well.
Something I just noticed while looking something up in the original Sun-Times stories about Kelly’s predilections, emphasis added:
The girl in the video, now 17, was identified by her aunt, who said that her niece would have been 14 at the time the tape was made, based on her appearance. Kelly can also be heard on the tape referring to the girl by her first name.
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