Mostly guilty.
That summarizes the verdicts received Monday in the Aaron Thompson trial.
After nine days of deliberations that followed six weeks of trial testimony, the Arapahoe County jury charged with deciding the case returned what some might call “mixed verdict” on 55 counts of child abuse, assault and related charges. They convicted Thompson on 31 charges and acquitted him on 22 counts.
But it was not so much a mixed verdict.
This was a clear victory for the prosecution, in a case handicapped by the absence of a corpse, and the death of a likely co-defendant, Shelley Lowe, Thompson’s erstwhile girlfriend and, based on the jury verdicts, co-conspirator in a multitude of callous and cold- blooded acts of child torture.
Lowe’s untimely demise permitted the defense to attempt to deflect blame for the “house of horrors” in which Aarone briefly lived on Lowe, without fear of direct contradiction by her.
And never being able to prove exactly how and when Aarone died was perceived at the beginning of the trial as a potentially insurmountable obstacle to conviction on the most serious charge: Thompson knowingly or recklessly caused Aarone’s death through acts of child abuse.
Obviously not so: Thompson was convicted of causing Aarone’s death, body or no body, in spite of inconsistent witness accounts of the supposed circumstances under which she met her end.
Which is not to say that the defense attorneys fell down on the job. Their task in representing Thompson, who admittedly lied to the police about his daughter’s supposed “disappearance” in November 2005, was also daunting — defending against a 60-count indictment on multiple acts of cruel child abuse allegedly inflicted on a total of eight different children, involving belts, baseball bats and who knows what else.
The defense faced too many accusations from the lips of too many youthful witnesses for outright acquittal to have ever been a viable possibility.
What stands out from the verdicts is the extent to which the jurors were conscientious in deciding the case.
It would have been all too easy for jurors to find Thompson guilty on all of the charges, once the jury determined that he was criminally culpable in his daughter’s death.
This the jury did not do, and it seems apparent that at least some jury members discounted the elaborate and colorful accounts of corporeal punishment claimed by two of the older boys who testified against Thompson; all of the acquittal verdicts save one involved the claims advanced by those two young men.
Thompson now faces decades of imprisonment on the convictions. While many of the charges on which Thompson was convicted are misdemeanors, the principal child-abuse charge alone carries a potential 48-year prison term.
Coupled with the consecutive sentences likely to be imposed on guilty verdicts on over a dozen additional felony counts, Aaron Thompson would need to have a life expectancy of truly biblical proportions to outlast his term of incarceration.
Which is just as it should be: Thompson may be only three- fifths guilty of the charges against him, but he is 100 percent responsible for what happened to his daughter and the other children unfortunate enough to have lived under his roof.
Scott Robinson is a Denver trial lawyer specializing in personal injury and criminal defense.
