Denver Postjim spencer
Bryant team may bulldoze rape statute
Tuesday, December 23, 2003 -
EAGLE - They talk in this small town about not letting the sex-assault case against Kobe Bryant turn into a sideshow. Nobody ever mentions Chinese water torture.
Next week is the six-month anniversary of the professional basketball star's alleged rape of a 19-year-old desk clerk at a Rocky Mountain resort. That charge is unresolved. A recent blizzard of defense motions and a seven-hour preliminary hearing helped sustain the limbo. The People vs. Kobe Bean Bryant is going nowhere. Bryant, one of the L.A. Lakers' top guns, makes tens of millions of dollars a year. He admits cheating on his wife but claims he had consensual sex. Now, his money has started to talk. It's saying that it will be harder to push this case through the justice system than it is to move Bryant's teammate, 7-1, 340-pound Shaquille O'Neal, away from the basket. After listening to the recent arguments, David Lugert, a lawyer who helped craft Colorado's rape shield law, explained it thus: A case that should have taken one folder of paperwork now comprises 12 volumes. And we're just getting started. Sideshow? What sideshow? O.J. Simpson prosecutor Marcia Clark didn't bother to come to the latest hearing as a TV talking head. Forget prosecutors' suggestion that defense lawyer Hal Haddon leaked to a friend information that Bryant's accuser had another man's semen in her panties. Haddon denies it. Forget, too, the defense's Darwin Award to Eagle District Attorney Mark Hurlbert, who, along with Assistant District Attorney Gregg Crittenden, were offered free anti-Bryant T-shirts that featured a stick figure being hung. Hurlbert wouldn't accept it. The Kobe Bryant rape case seems destined to become a "War and Peace' of jurisprudence. It will wear the process out the way Leo Tolstoy's artistic but unwieldy novel exhausted so many well-intentioned readers. Bryant's lawyers will mount an artful, interminable defense. They will drive prosecutors, the judge and - at some point in the unforeseeable future - jurors to distraction. Bryant's lawyers, Haddon and Pam Mackey, are just doing their jobs. The problem is that their skill could haunt sexual-assault victims long after a chastened, but criminally absolved, adulterer leaves Colorado, never to return, except to play the Denver Nuggets. Bryant's well-financed, careful defense might do more than strip gears in the wheels of justice. It could reverse the engine. As this case plays out, the state rape-shield law that protects a victim's sexual history from being used to assassinate her character faces at least as aggressive a challenge as a basketball icon. Bryant's lawyers have gone after the very basis of the law. They claim it amounts to a double standard, because a rape defendant's prior carnal shenanigans can be introduced, while an accuser's cannot. That fight will be extended and ugly, based on existing defense motions and court banter. Bryant's lawyers will try to twist legislative intent into a moral pretzel. They'll take weeks, if not months, to do it. Then there's the business of the mental health of Bryant's accuser. The defense hopes to win this case by getting her mental health records admitted as evidence. Bryant's accuser is too crazy to be believed, this theory of the defendant's innocence goes. She tried to kill herself twice to get her former boyfriend's attention, defense lawyers claim. Now, she's had consensual sex with Bryant and cried foul to attract her ex, they say. This approach makes sense for attorneys whose professional responsibility rests with a client with bottomless pockets. For the rest of us, it panders to prejudice. To everybody, it means time. You want to know how Byzantine this thing has become? Bryant's lawyers filed a motion to get one line in a rape counselor's report. One line. At a hearing last week, lawyers spent half an hour arguing the point. The judge didn't make a decision. At the same hearing, Judge Terry Ruckriegle also chose not to rule on admitting the accuser's mental health records or prior sexual history as evidence. He couldn't even hold oral arguments on some of these points. You want to talk convoluted? Ruckriegle went into a closed hearing to see if the defense could prove its witnesses had real evidence. He had to do that before he could hear public arguments about whether to hold a public hearing that included their testimony. Got that? Me neither. These days, you need a lawyer in tow to follow the proceedings. But God forbid you should talk to one inside the courthouse to get it right. The way the media rules have been drawn up for the case, reporters are not allowed to interview anyone in the courtrooms or hallways during breaks. That's about par for the course at this point in the People vs. Kobe Bean Bryant. Right now, a time-consuming process matters as much as the truth. The only way that qualifies as a sideshow is with Tolstoy as a carnival barker. Jim Spencer's column appears Sundays, Tuesdays and Thursdays. Contact him at jspencer@denverpost.com or 303-820-1771. |