A judge refused Wednesday to give Aaron Thompson seven different trials, rejecting defense arguments that “there will be an overall assassination” of Thompson’s character if he is forced to answer to multiple criminal counts at one trial.
Thompson is charged with 60 counts, including child abuse resulting in death, conspiracy to commit child abuse and multiple counts of child abuse.
Thompson is accused of repeatedly abusing his children and causing the death of his daughter Aarone, who would have been 6 years old when she was reported missing Nov. 14, 2005. Her body has never been found.
Prosecutor Amy Richardson told Arapahoe County District Judge J. Mark Hannen that if attorneys for Thompson succeeded in their request for the separate trials, it would require seven children who lived in the Thompson household with Aarone to testify seven different times.
She said the children suffered the same types of abuse at the hands of Thompson and his common-law wife, Shelley Lowe, and that the abuse occurred in the same time frame, roughly over a three-year period from 2002 to late 2005.
Investigators said the children told them they were beaten with baseball bats, belts, electrical cords, a folded-up magazine and bare fists.
Further, Richardson said, the children were told they had to lie about when they had last seen Aarone.
Police believe she actually died in the summer of 2002, not when Thompson first told authorities that Aarone had run away from home in November 2005.
Richardson argued that all the incidents, including the abuse and disappearance of Aarone, took place in the same house.
But defense attorney James Karbach questioned whether the jury would be “able to separate out all the legal issues and all the factual issues at play.” There are so many counts related to the children that are separate and apart from the allegations related to Aarone’s disappearance, he said, that the result of a single trial would be “an overall assassination on (Thompson’s) character.”
But Hannen said that as of now, he will permit just one trial, as the prosecution requested, because all the events are “connected, related and intertwined.”
Howard Pankratz: 303-954-1939 or hpankratz@denverpost.com
