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Despite Changed Testimony, Jury Votes “Guilty”

by allison schwartz | Jun 29, 2009 9:44 pm

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Posted to: Legal Writes

Waiting for the jury to enter the courtroom, Steeve LaFleur read from the Bible and awaited his fate. He had more than faith going for him — one of the women he allegedly beat up had recanted her story on the stand.

Just as court closed for business on Church Street Monday, LaFleur got an answer: a jury found him guilty in two separate cases of assaulting women on West Division Street in Newhallville.

LaFleur, 33, is to be sentenced Tuesday by state Superior Court Judge William Holden.

His case took a surprise turn at trial last week, when one of the two victims took the stand and said she could no longer remember what happened.

In their closing arguments before the jury deliberated Monday, attorneys on both sides of the case tried to turn the surprise developments of the past week to their advantage — and address head on the question of how to decide whom to trust.

“I want to talk about the idea of determining credibility,” prosecutor James Clark told the jury. He returned to the word throughout his closing remarks.

LaFleur had taken the stand in his own defense late last week. (Click here to read about that.) Clark focused the jury’s attention on that testimony — on how, in Clark’s retelling, LaFleur only “answered questions that he wanted to answer” when cross-examined about the first of the two attacks.

It was the victim of the second attack who changed her story. Clark suggested that that had something to do with how people react to domestic violence. The victim is the mother of LaFleur’s daughter. “Domestic violence cases means that usually they don’t want to get on the stand,” Clark said. He said the victim “considered him [LaFleur] a good father and had wanted her child to have that option.”

He offered a second possible explanation, too. “Did the victim “testify that way out of fear?” he asked rhetorically.

She had been scared of LaFleur before, he said, when she originally went to the police about being assaulted. Now she is scared not of of LaFleur, but of losing child support, he argued.

Turning to the defendant’s testimony, Clark attacked LaFleur’s alibi: That he couldn’t have committed one of the attacks because at the time some people had kidnapped him, stripped him naked and beaten him. It turned out he had told the same story on another occasion to the cops; and that an officer hadn’t seen any evidence of his being assaulted.

“What do you know about this amazing story?” Clark asked.

Sowing Doubt

When it was defense attorney Walter Bansley’s turn to sum up, he emphasized the doubts created by changing testimony.

“You are not the detectives,” he told the jury. If there is any kind of doubt in the state’s case, then the state has not properly met the burden of proof, he argued.

He cited a police report describing the victim of the first attack of “elusive.” She also gave two different accounts of where precisely the assault had occurred.

At least “Mr. LaFleur testified that his story changed and didn’t try to hide it,” Bansley offered.

Then there was the second victim’s recanted testimony. “She is not as afraid of him [LaFleur] as the state would have you believe,” Bansley insisted.

In reviewing the allegation that LaFleur had come to her window and harassed her, Bansley argued, “She hears voices ladies and gentleman.” He then showed a slide that described her through several bullet points: she was bipolar, schizophrenic, with a drug problem. Such a woman, he argued, could easily have imagined LaFleur appearing in her window.

He added that she is currently on probation. While looking directly at the jury, Bansley claimed, “She was forced to testify.” She was nervous about getting in trouble again and worried that the state Department of Child and Family Services would take away her child, he said. Consequently, Bansley protested, she took the stand unwillingly, which was demonstrated through her recanted testimony.

Clark had one more shot to convince the jury otherwise.

Standing in the middle of the court, he held up a pad of paper. Claiming he had written a phrase, but writing something else, he argued, “Just because someone stands up here and says something doesn’t mean its true.”

In the end, the jury saw it Clark’s way.

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