Steubenville rape trial: Prosecutor speaks of victim’s ‘degradation’

After brief opening statements, the trial of two Steubenville High School athletes charged with raping a 16-year-old girl got underway Wednesday in an Ohio courtroom, with prosecutors repeatedly accusing them of degrading a victim too drunk to resist and the defense insisting the girl’s silence indicated consent.

Trent Mays, 17, and Ma’Lik Richmond, 16, football players on the high school’s revered team, sat silently as prosecutor Marianne Hemmeter repeatedly used the word “degradation” in her opening statements to describe the boys’ alleged treatment of the girl.

“We’ll hear testimony that she’s sitting in the street, vomiting. Somebody takes her clothes off,” Hemmeter told a courtroom filled to capacity in the Ohio River town of 18,400 people. “The degradation continues,” Hemmeter said, describing what witnesses have said were two rapes: one in the back of a car, and another in the basement of a house.

Richmond’s attorney, Walter Madison, did not give a statement. Brian Duncan, representing Mays, gave a brief opening in which he reiterated what the defense has said since the boys were arrested Aug. 22: that the sex was consensual.

“Our position has remained unchanged,” he said. “That position is that Trent Mays did not rape the young lady in question.”

Each defendant faces confinement in a juvenile facility until the age of 21 and would have to register as a sex offender if found guilty in the non-jury case. Judge Thomas Lipps is hearing the case in juvenile court. He rejected motions by both the defense and the prosecution to close it to the public and the press.

But many of the witnesses will be juveniles with the option of asking that they not be recorded or filmed during their testimony, as occurred with the first of what is likely to be several dozen witnesses who took the stand Wednesday.

The trial got underway after the defense attorneys withdrew motions to dismiss the charges. Those motions had been filed after two of the alleged victim’s closest friends had refused to travel from neighboring Weirton, W.Va., to Ohio to testify. A West Virginia judge ruled late Tuesday that they were compelled to testify, making the dismissal motions moot. The alleged victim, who lives in Weirton and who knew her alleged attackers, could also take the stand.

Witnesses testified during an October hearing that the girl became increasingly drunk and incapacitated while going from one party to another on the night of Aug. 11 and into the early morning hours of Aug. 12. They have described her vomiting at least twice, needing help walking, and eventually lying naked and unmoving as she was assaulted.

The defense, however, says she consciously made the decision to get in a car and go to parties with the accused, and that she had her wits about her enough to provide her cellphone password to the defendants.

Their claims that because she did not say “no,” she was consenting, has enraged women’s groups, which are demanding that additional charges be filed against witnesses who did not try to stop the alleged rapes.

Ohio’s attorney general has said he’ll decide whether to file additional charges when this trial is over.

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