The Denver Postkobe bryant case
Hushed talks signaled end
Friday, September 03, 2004 - Eagle - Eagle County Sheriff Joe Hoy glanced out the window of his office Wednesday afternoon and spied District Attorney Mark Hurlbert with the two detectives who investigated the Kobe Bryant sexual-assault allegations.
Immediately, he jokingly shouted out the window to them that someone ought to lock the doors. Then he realized they were heading his way. "Oh, this ought to be good," Hoy thought, fighting a sinking feeling. Just after 3 p.m., it was his first sign that the case against Bryant was going to be dropped, a bombshell he did not anticipate. Hurlbert, who first had heard the night before from the accuser's attorney that she might not continue with the case, carried with him a motion to dismiss the charges, and he was trying to get out the word. Only moments before, the DA notified the basketball star's own attorneys and then approached the sheriff and his investigators to say that the accuser no longer wanted to pursue the case. "I understand it, and I respect it," Hoy said, acknowledging that the decision nonetheless was disappointing. "She's had a tough time. What else can you say? None of us can imagine what she's gone through." Hurlbert himself had only confirmed the decision with the 20-year-old woman in a phone conversation at 11 a.m. "It was a sense of letdown," he conceded Thursday in an interview with The Denver Post. "Not that she let us down. She didn't." Three weeks earlier, however, the accuser filed a civil suit against Bryant, which many legal analysts presumed was a death knell for the criminal case. The accuser's attorneys, John Clune and L. Lin Wood, followed that with high-profile media appearances in which they depicted her as wavering in her willingness to go to trial. But Hurlbert and his staff of prosecutors continued preparing for the case and insisted that the accuser remained resolute. By late Tuesday afternoon, when attorneys for both sides were mired in closed-door jury selection, known as "voir dire," Clune told Hurlbert that the former hotel clerk would no longer be willing to participate. The next morning, it was revealed that the defense had filed a motion seeking to dismiss the case on the grounds that prosecutors may have withheld evidence that could have helped clear Bryant. Defense attorney Hal Haddon argued that prosecutors had failed to disclose that forensics expert Michael Baden expressed an opinion that the accuser may have suffered her injuries through sex with another man - and then prosecutors decided not to call him to testify. Hurlbert responded Thursday that the motion was unsubstantiated and that prosecutors were preparing to fight it even as the case disintegrated. In court, the morning session started routinely enough, as attorneys and Bryant - not knowing what was brewing - returned to the courtroom for the last session of juror questioning. When that ended shortly after noon, the basketball star headed off in a caravan of SUVs to the Eagle County Regional Airport, where he caught a private flight back to Los Angeles for the night. Early that afternoon in Eagle, District Judge Terry Ruckriegle was interrupted during a regular meeting with other judges from the district. Several television networks, he was told, were reporting that the case was over. "We had completed individual voir dire, and I had 174 jurors ready, willing and able," Ruckriegle told The Post. "I was prepared to go to trial." He had the attorneys summoned to the courthouse for an explanation behind closed doors. In the ensuing hours, attorneys for both sides scurried in and out of the courtroom and held animated but hushed discussions in the hallway, just out of earshot of members of the media. Finally, Ruckriegle called an open hearing at 5:45 p.m., and reporters who had been confined to a limited number of strictly assigned seats throughout the proceedings quickly filled every available spot in the courtroom. Sheriff's Detective Doug Winters and Clune, along with Eagle County Judge Frederick Gannett - who originally heard the case through the preliminary hearing - sat in the jury box. The accuser's parents anchored the first row of seats behind the prosecution table. "The court calls the matter of the People vs. Kobe Bryant, 03-CR-204," Ruckriegle intoned as usual, marking the beginning of the end. Staff writers Alicia Caldwell and Howard Pankratz contributed to this report.
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