Prosecutor: St. Paul’s rape-trial suspect ‘took what he wanted’
For all the evidence — Facebook messages, emails, confusing jokes to friends, and questions about when Owen Labrie lied and why — the case against the St. Paul’s school graduate is really very simple, a prosecutor said Wednesday.
“We’re here today because [she] said no, and he took what he wanted,’’ Joseph Cherniske told jurors in his closing argument.
Over six days, jurors have heard from Labrie, 19, his now 16-year-old accuser, their friends, family members, and detectives. The evidence has included dozens of emails between the two, and between Labrie and his friends.
All agree that Labrie, then a senior at New Hampshire’s elite St. Paul’s School who was headed to Harvard in the fall, invited the girl to spend time with him. It was a “Senior Salute,’’ a tradition at the school in which seniors invite younger students to join them – sometimes for kissing, sometimes more.
Jurors began deliberations Thursday and went home for the day without reaching a verdict. They will decide what happened next, in a dark, mechanical room in a campus building on May 30, 2014.
Did Labrie ignore her saying no three times, while she held on to her bra and underwear? While she told him to keep his face away from her vagina? Did he force intercourse anyway?
Or, as Labrie told them, was it a mutually erotic makeout session that stopped cold only when he had a moment of “divine inspiration’’ as he was rolling on a condom?
Cherniske spoke as Labrie’s crude Facebook chats with friends were projected on a screen behind him. Cherniske said that for a year, Labrie wanted to have sex with the girl. Two nights before graduation, he decided he finally had his chance.
“In his own words, he wanted to ‘slay’ her,’’ he said. “And on May 30, 2014, he turned his lust for a 15-year-old girl into a reality.’’
Defense attorney J.W. Carney made much of the girl’s “expectations,’’ that night. She had told her best friend that she might let Labrie put his fingers inside her, and that she might give him oral sex.
Cherniske’s response: So what?
“Does that mean she can’t change her mind?’’ he said. “Does that mean she has to go through with it? No.’’
Carney said jurors cannot believe the girl, in part because she lied on the stand when he asked whether she told her best friend about her sexual expectations that night. The girl didn’t want to admit that she might be interested in some sexual acts, Carney said, because it wouldn’t fit her image as an innocent in this whole encounter.
She wanted it to be a secret, she wrote in her message to Labrie, accepting his invitation. Carney said she didn’t want to be a disappointment to her older sister, a student at the school who thought the Senior Salute was gross and had briefly dated Labrie years earlier. She didn’t want anyone to know.
So when people found out they had been together, she “had to make a decision, if it was her reputation that went into the toilet, or Owen’s,’’ Carney said. “She took the easier choice.’’
Carney said the girl’s giggling during the encounter, her positive messages to Labrie minutes after, and her comments to friends indicate that it wasn’t a rape. While they were in the room together, how was Labrie supposed to know she wasn’t having a good time?
Her conduct should have told him, Cherniske said. She “said no. She said it with her words. She said it with her actions. He had sex with her anyway,’’ he said.
She did everything a 15-year-old girl knew to do in such a situation, Cherniske said.
Labrie is facing three aggravated felony sexual assault counts, accused of having sex with her against her will. He’s also charged with three misdemeanor sexual assault counts, because the girl was under 16, under the age of consent in New Hampshire. Other charges include assault, because he is accused of biting her, and endangering a child and using a computer to solicit her.
He is facing up to 20 years in prison and a lifetime of being labeled a sex offender.
Both Cherniske and Carney told jurors to use common sense.
Labrie and his defense attorney say he never had intercourse with the girl, though some of his friends testified that he told them he did.
Doesn’t it make sense, Carney said, that Labrie would lie to his friends and brag that they had sex, when really it ended more awkwardly?
Cherniske asked why the girl would lie: Were all of her reactions to her friends, her mom, the doctors, the detectives, all staged?
“What kid would go through all of this,’’ he said, “unless it’s 100 percent true?’’
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