Defense claims that an alleged sexual assault victim lied in previous sex-assault reports can’t be heard by a jury simply because no charges were filed in those cases, the Colorado Supreme Court ruled Monday.
The decision was hailed by prosecutors and victims’ advocates who said the ruling shows that Colorado’s rape shield law is alive and well.
“The Colorado Supreme Court said the victims of crime will not be the additional victims of fishing expeditions by the defense. And that is sound public policy,” said Steve Siegel, co-chairman of the public policy committee of the Colorado Organization for Victims Assistance.
The unanimous court said that there can be numerous reasons why criminal charges aren’t filed in sexual-assault cases, including concern about the alleged victim’s welfare.
The decision came in a 2004 case of a 12-year-old Adams County girl, who said that her great-uncle molested her. The uncle’s defense team said they had uncovered repeated instances where the child claimed to have been molested by other men, but no charges were ever filed.
They asserted the child had a history of lying about sexual assaults.
Adams County District Judge Harlan Bockman ruled that a jury could hear the claims that the child lied. He said defense evidence would help the jury weigh the child’s credibility.
But the Supreme Court, in an opinion written by Justice Gregory Hobbs, said Colorado’s rape shield statute bars flimsy allegations of lying. Here, he said, the allegations were simply made by a defense affidavit and no evidence was presented to show that any of the prior sexual assault reports were, in fact, false.
“Prior to the enactment of the rape shield statutes, a typical tactic of defendants in sexual abuse cases was to put the victim’s credibility on trial through his or her prior sexual history,” wrote Hobbs.
“As a result, the price of making a sexual assault victim’s testimony available to the courts of law historically exposed the victim to detailed questioning about his or her prior sexual conduct. This discouraged victims from reporting and prosecuting sexual assault.”
Adams County District Attorney Don Quick said the rape shield statute was developed to prohibit fishing expeditions into a victim’s past.
“I think what the Supreme Court did was to make it clear that the rape shield law is alive and well. Just because a victim has previously reported a sexual assault doesn’t necessarily mean that it was false just because it wasn’t prosecuted,” Quick said.
Quick said that in recent years, defense attorneys, especially in high publicity cases, had been chipping away at the rape shield statute.
Jill K. McFadden, executive director of the Rape Assistance and Awareness Program, said FBI statistics show that only 2 percent to 8 percent of sexual assault reports are false.
“We oftentimes will hear that people bring civil cases because they want to make money off of it,” she said. “It’s not happening.”
Staff writer Howard Pankratz can be reached at 303-820-1939 or hpankratz@denverpost.com.
