January 5, 2013 -- Updated 1258 GMT (2058 HKT)
The alleged rape of a 16-year-old girl has shaken Steubenville, Ohio. A
storm of social media attention has "tried in the court of public
opinion," an attorney for a defendant said. FULL STORY
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OPINION: SOME DON'T SEE IT AS RAPE
Defense battles social media blizzard in Ohio rape case
January 5, 2013 -- Updated 0345 GMT (1145 HKT)
Social media spotlights Ohio rape case
STORY HIGHLIGHTS
- NEW: Defense attorney claims the alleged victim sent his client a note after the purported attack
- NEW: "I know you didn't rape me," he says the text message read
- NEW: Lawyer for the alleged victim declines to comment on the message
- NEW: "I think we lose sight; this is a 16-year-old girl," he tells CNN
"One of the main concerns
we have is that this matter has been, by special interest groups all
over the world, tried in the court of public opinion," said Walter
Madison, attorney for Ma'lik Richmond.
Richmond and another
16-year-old member of the small town's highly regarded football team,
Trent Mays, are charged with raping the girl at a series of
back-to-school parties on August 11-12. Mays also is charged with
"illegal use of a minor in nudity-oriented material."
Although the teenagers
are juveniles, CNN is identifying them because they have been publicly
named by a juvenile court judge, by defense attorneys and in media
accounts. CNN is not identifying the girl, who also is a juvenile, in
accordance with its policy not to release the names of alleged rape
victims.
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Special prosecutors from
the state attorney general's office allege the teens repeatedly sexually
assaulted the girl while she was unconscious.
The case gained national
attention after The New York Times published a lengthy piece on it in
December and an activist hacker group this week posted a previously
unpublicized video of teenagers in the small Ohio River valley town
cracking jokes about the case.
That group -- Anonymous
-- and other critics have accused community leaders of trying to paper
over rampant misconduct by team members, and have suggested that other
students took part in the assaults or failed to do enough stop them.
Authorities have declined to say whether anyone else could be charged.
The controversy has
shaken the city, with some residents accusing outsiders of trying to
ruin the reputation of the town's high school football team, one of the
few bright spots in the economically depressed community of 18,000.
"The buzz that keeps
coming about is that Steubenville is a bad place, things are being
covered up, more people should be arrested and I feel that's all
unjustly so," said Jerry Barilla, a longtime store owner. "Because I
think that to condemn an entire city for something that happened is not
right. To condemn an entire school and all the kids that go there for
something that took place among a few students is still not right."
Madison said that buzz has bled into the criminal justice system, making it difficult for his client to get a fair trial.
For instance, he said
Friday on CNN's "Starting Point" that one widely circulated image
showing two people, apparently teenagers, holding a girl by her arms and
legs has been taken out of context. Madison said his client is one of
the teenagers shown in the image.
"The photo is out of
context," he said. "That young lady is not unconscious. That young lady
was capable of walking, and her friends are individuals who indicated
that information to the police. And they weren't selected (by
prosecutors) for this hearing that we've had thus far because that
didn't serve the purpose of the hearing."
Early hearings in
criminal cases often hinge on the prosecution showing it has sufficient
evidence for the case to go forward, not to prove a defendant's
innocence.
Madison said more
information will come out at trial, which is scheduled for February 13.
Among the issues, he said, will be whether the girl had consented to any
sexual conduct.
Regarding the widely
circulated photograph, Adam Nemann, Mays' attorney, said a potential
witness would testify at trial that the girl was not unconscious when
the photograph was taken.
Nemann also told CNN
that the alleged victim sent his client a text message a few days after
the purported attack. "I know you didn't rape me," it read, according to
Nemann. He declined to show CNN the message.
When asked why he
thought the alleged victim might send such a message, Nemann answered:
"Because I don't think she thinks she was raped."
Robert Fitzsimmons,
attorney for the alleged victim, declined to comment on the alleged
message and the widely circulated photograph.
However, he stressed the girl was unconscious and cited a common saying: "A picture speaks a thousand words."
"The allegations in this
case are not that this was a person that knew what was happening to
her. It's that she was so unconscious that she didn't know what
happened," he told CNN's "AC360."
Ohio Attorney General
Mike DeWine, whose office is investigating and prosecuting the case,
declined Friday on "Starting Point" to say whether anyone else could be
charged in the case. But, he said, investigators are continuing to
follow leads.
On Thursday, the police
chief who initially investigated the case, before the Jefferson County
prosecutor asked state officials to step in, said he doesn't expect much
additional evidence to surface in the case.
"You can come up with
conspiracy theories and everything, but for prosecutors to take a case
to trial, you have to have substantial evidence, you have to have
evidence that can be presented. And in this case, I don't believe there
is much more," Steubenville Chief William McCafferty said.
He said he believes his town, and his force, have been portrayed unfairly.
"I think they have made
our community look like something that its not. It's a very good
community," he said. "Nobody condones rape, nobody condones
lawlessness."
But McCafferty also said he's puzzled why no one intervened in the alleged assaults.
"Why didn't somebody stop it?" he said. "You simply don't do that. ... It's not done."
Authorities charged
Richmond and Mays on August 27, the same day Jefferson County's
prosecuting attorney asked DeWine's office to take over the case.
In addition to the rape
and "nudity-oriented material" charges, the teens also were originally
charged with kidnapping. A juvenile court judge dismissed that charge in
October, according to McCafferty and Nemann, Mays' attorney.
"My client asserts his innocence, and he looks forward to his day in court," Nemann said.
Nemann also said that
prosecutors gave letters to three teens who testified at the early
hearing, telling them they wouldn't be prosecuted if they testified
about what they'd done. Attorney General DeWine previously told CNN that
prosecutors offered no deals. It was not immediately clear whether
Nemann and DeWine differed on the existence of such letters, or on their
definitions of "deal."
Local authorities asked
the state to take over to show that "everything that can be done in this
case is being done," county prosecutor Jane Hanlin told CNN affiliate
WTOV at the time.
"And if that means
eliciting the help of these people from the attorney general's office,
then that's what we want to do in this case," she said.
In addition, the FBI has
offered "some technical assistance" in the investigation, said FBI
spokesman Todd Lindgren in Cincinnati. He did not go into detail.
Offering such assistance is routine, he said.
The case has been
complicated by a lack of physical evidence -- the family did not report
the alleged assaults until August 14. It also apparently hinges largely
on witness statements, social media images and messages posted after the
incident and possibly some information gleaned from cell phones seized
by police. The family gathered many of the materials and delivered them
to police on a portable computer drive, McCafferty told CNN.
Police have heard of a
video showing the alleged attack, McCafferty said. But authorities don't
have it or know whether it even exists, he said.
Police did seize several
cell phones and iPads during the investigation, and "there was evidence
on some of the phones," McCafferty said without elaborating.
The New York Times reported that a cell phone photo from that night shows the girl naked on a floor.
A special unit with the
attorney general's office is examining the materials, McCafferty said.
DeWine's office has declined to comment on evidence in the case.
Text messages posted to
social networking sites that night, later retrieved and published by a
crime blogger, seemed to brag about the incident, calling the girl
"sloppy," making references to rape and suggesting that she had been
urinated on, according to crime blogger Alexandria Goddard. CNN has not
established whether that is true.
Goddard, a former
Steubenville resident, discovered and preserved many of the messages, at
least some of which are now in the hands of authorities. She first
spotted the story in the small town's newspaper and started looking into
the situation on a hunch that the highly regarded football team's
members were getting special treatment at the expense of the victim.
"When I first came
across the article, I just felt like -- because it was involving
football players, and there is a culture there that football is very
important -- that there was probably a little more to this story than
what the local media was reporting," she told CNN on Thursday. "So I
started doing my own research."
The case gained
additional exposure this week when a group calling itself Knight Sec and
saying it is part of Anonymous -- the loosely organized cooperative of
activist hackers -- published a video purporting to show Steubenville
students discussing the assault in joking tones.
In the video, a teenager
makes joke after joke about the girl's condition, saying she must have
died because she didn't move during one assault.
Anonymous and others in
the video identified the teen by a name that doesn't match the two who
were charged, but CNN cannot independently confirm his identity.
"Is it really rape
because you don't know if she wanted to or not," the teenager says on
the video. "She might have wanted to. That might have been her final
wish."
Other male voices can be
heard off-camera, laughing and talking about the alleged assault.
McCafferty said he cannot say who shot that video.
"The subject in that
video was interviewed. He wasn't charged," the chief told CNN. "The
attorney general's office has all this. It appears to me after I watched
the video he was intoxicated."
Anonymous has taken up the case, hacking a site dedicated to high school sports in Steubenville
and separately publishing on one of its websites a trove of images,
texts and accusations involving students, coaches and boosters. Those
individuals have not been named or charged by authorities with any
crime.
Anonymous says it is
collecting detailed information about the personal affairs of football
boosters and others in Steubenville who the group claims may have helped
cover up the alleged attack. It's also planning a protest "to help those who have been victimized by the football team or other regimes."
"The town of
Steubenville has been good at keeping this quiet and their star football
team protected," an Anonymous member wearing the group's trademark Guy
Fawkes mask says in a video posted to the group's LocalLeaks website.
The organization, he
says, will not allow "a group of young men who turn to rape as a game or
sport get the pass because of athletic ability or small-town luck."
The attorney for the girl's family told CNN that the girl is in counseling and is "doing as well as one can expect."
"She's trying to go about her life right now, which is difficult because of all the media attention," Fitzsimmons said. "It's as if she's just flown into this barnstorm. She'll make it through."
Speaking on CNN's "AC360," he said: "I think we lose sight; this is a 16-year-old girl. She's a high school kid, basically."
CNN's Poppy Harlow reported from Steubenville. CNN's Ross Levitt and Susan Candiotti also contributed to this report.
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