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Maybe this is what playing the Devil’s Advocate is all about. On Tuesday, in a trial at Liberty County against 20 men who gang-raped an 11-year-old girl in Cleveland, while the prosecutors called the men a “pack of dogs,” the defense counsel likened the victim to a spider luring men into her web.
However, on Wednesday, jurors handed a life sentence to the accused within 10 minutes of deliberation. But the defense lawyer’s drama on Tuesday is making rounds on the internet.
The defense lawyer Steve Taylor, kept insisting the girl was the “reason” why the men committed the crime.
When the lead investigator in the case, Sgt. Chad Langdon of the Cleveland Police Department tried to point out that an 11-year-old cannot legally give consent for a sexual encounter, the Houston Chronicle reports smart Steve “asking why the underage girl had not been charged with anything for choosing to violate that rule.”
This is one smart lawyer.
The defense lawyer pointed out that the girl had never cried or complained about the 20 males assaulting her and proudly videotaping their sexual encounters, and that when he asked whether she had been a “willing participant,” she had said, “yes sir.”
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He asked, “Like the spider and the fly. Wasn’t she saying, ‘Come into my parlor, said the spider to the fly?’”
When the lead investigator replied “I wouldn’t call her a spider … I’d say she was just an 11-year-old girl,” the defense lawyer retorted, “I hope nothing like this ever happens to your two teenage sons.”
“I would not whitewash it or sweep it under the rug,” replied Langdon.
The accused, Cruse, who was already serving eight years for aggravated robbery and aggravated assault with a deadly weapon in crimes unrelated to the present case, was sentenced to life on Wednesday in the court of State District Judge Mark Morefield.
Kudos to Houston Chronicle for reporting this first.
