In Search of Justice : Oakland Woman Says She Was Raped and Pushes the System to Follow Up

June Williams couldn’t believe it. He was snoring. The man she says raped and savagely beat her for hours was sleeping, an arm and a leg thrown over her, pinning her down.

Her heart pounded so fast, she thought it would wake him. Inch by inch, the seconds stretching into hours, Williams gently lifted his arm and freed her upper body; then she slid out from under his leg. Fearing the sound of every footfall, Williams stole to the side of her bedroom, her hands searching for something to grab to stop the shaking.

Then she bolted.

Outside in the chilly night, wearing only the robe she grabbed on the way out, Williams banged on her building manager’s door, got no answer and moved on to the apartment of a friend, who called 911.

A little before 4 a.m., on July 5, 1990, Oakland police officers awoke Michael Mumphrey in the bed of his first cousin Williams and arrested him. Mumphrey denied raping her; he said she had agreed to swap her body for crack cocaine.

The Alameda County district attorney’s office decided not to file rape charges. That’s often been the story here. In fact, in 1989, the last year for which complete data is available, the Oakland police department said that almost 25% of reported rapes didn’t happen--”unfounded,” in cop lingo. The state average was about 5%.

But it turns out that 90% of the “unfounded” Oakland cases did happen. How those cases slipped through the bureaucracy, and how Williams’ alleged rapist wasn’t charged with the crime for six months, is a story familiar to many rape victims. Particularly, some say, when the victims are poor minority women whose lives may already be troubled by drugs and violence.

Rape-prevention advocates and law-enforcement officials say the victims often are fearful, abused women who may know their attackers, may even have had sex willingly with them before, who may have used drugs or may have drunk with them. These difficult cases often get short shrift from overburdened and understaffed police forces in favor of easier ones.

For cops, it’s a long haul to win these victims’ trust--questioning those who don’t want to be questioned and keeping track of women who sometimes would rather quietly disappear. For prosecutors, it’s making a jury believe a witness who may lack credibility. For victims, it’s reliving a nightmare again and again, hoping that something comes from it. Or, in Williams’ case, badgering officials until it does.

“It’s difficult to get any rape case charged . . . unless there’s a lot of physical evidence,” said Marcia Blackstock, director of Bay Area Women Against Rape. “I think it’s definitely hard still for people engaging in activities that the general population doesn’t think of as good, like drugs and prostitution.

“And you’re dealing with people (victims) who feel that the system is stacked against them. They feel the system isn’t going to help them.”

Often the system--from cops to attorneys to jurors--looks askance at such victims, says Mark Melton, a deputy district attorney in Oakland:

“They tend to see a black woman smoking crack as a woman who is willing to give herself up for the dope. They consider that tantamount to consent if you’re smoking rock. Credibility is everything.”

Nothing much went right on that Fourth of July for Williams, a 46-year-old Oakland native with two children, two ex-husbands, a psychology degree, no job and no money.

She went to a relative’s party, fought with some people there and left with Mumphrey, her 33-year-old cousin. She says she bought a rock of crack and they fired up that evening in her apartment. The high disappeared fast and they left for a couple hours, later returning with another man to drink some cheap wine.

Mumphrey later said, according to his lawyer, that Williams was going to swap sex with the other man for a few bucks, but he left. Then Mumphrey said he’d find a way to get more crack if Williams would have sex with him.

“When they got through, Mike said, ‘I’m tired,’ and went to sleep,” said Mumphrey’s lawyer, Carter A. Beavers, who refused to let his client be interviewed. “The next thing he knew, the police were waking him up. She must have gone out in the street and got in a fight and blamed it on him.”

Williams has a different story:

Mumphrey grabbed her in a chokehold and said, “Cousin or no cousin, I’m going to have you.” He dragged her up the stairs and started to rape her; she broke away and managed to get one hand on the door before he caught her.

Williams said she passed in and out of consciousness several times as Mumphrey beat and raped her, coming to the last time to hear the snoring.

Oakland led the state in per-capita rapes in 1989. It was seventh in the nation among large cities, with 120 reported rapes per 100,000 people. By way of comparison, Los Angeles was ranked 30th, with 58.7 reported rapes per 100,000 people.

The Oakland Police Department’s three sexual-assault investigators worked 585 cases that year.

It’s not an easy job. Some victims refuse to submit to a medical exam, during which hair and semen samples are sought and the woman’s fingernails are scraped for the rapist’s skin. Others give false addresses or move. Some don’t want to press charges. A few just plain won’t help cops do anything.

“Those (rapes) are very difficult cases to prosecute,” said Capt. James Hahn, who heads the Oakland police sex crimes unit. “Often there’s no question rape occurred, (but) it’s very difficult to show to a jury. When does consent stop and force start? The reality is that sometimes you have to have some good injuries.”

And traumatized victims whose lives may already be in disarray add to the difficulty of these cases.

“When you have a witness who is a drug user, their lifestyle is one that is just not conducive to maintaining contacts and commitments,” said Hahn. “It takes a lot to bring these witnesses to court.”

But the problem here was that the cases didn’t get to court. The dogged sleuthing, hard-won trust and bureaucratic flexibility that police and advocates say are essential to shepherding these cases through the system frequently just didn’t happen in Oakland.

Then in September, 1990, the San Francisco Examiner reported that Oakland had “unfounded” 24.44% of all rapes cases, a rate more than twice that of any large California city. (Los Angeles ranked fourth for 1989, with 4.86% of rapes termed unfounded.)

The police department reopened more than 200 cases filed away as meritless for two years and discovered that 90% should have been pursued further. Thirty-seven had been closed without the victim even being interviewed.

“We blew it,” admitted Oakland Police Chief George Hart.

Hahn said many investigators were unaware of the federal Universal Crime Reporting Act guidelines that require officers to contact victims and pursue cases thoroughly before giving up. The internal review process had also broken down, he said. And police relations with the local Women Against Rape group were on the skids.

All that has changed, Hahn says, and rape-prevention activists agree. New investigators have been assigned to the unit, which already had been increased to six officers. Training has been beefed up, guidelines stressed and community relations are on the mend.

“It takes as much effort to investigate an unfounded case as it does to prosecute one,” Hahn said. “We’re pretty comfortable with what we’re doing.”

When the police interviewed the shaking and sobbing Williams after she fled her apartment, she told them how her cousin had raped and beat her. She didn’t tell them she had smoked crack with him earlier in the evening; she says the police didn’t ask and it didn’t seem important.

To the district attorney’s office, however, the drug use raised a red flag: An admitted drug user claiming to have been raped is hard to sell to a jury. It would be easier, said Melton, to bust Mumphrey on a parole violation of his prior auto-theft conviction, which would give him a solid year in state prison.

If convicted, Mumphrey could get at least 25 years on multiple rape and assault counts, or he could go free in front of a jury that has to find guilt beyond a shadow of a doubt. A parole board, however, must only find a preponderance of guilt, and that’s what happened; Mumphrey was returned to prison for parole violation.

But it wasn’t good enough for Williams. She started calling senior Deputy Dist. Atty. Chris Carpenter--in the morning, in the afternoon, every day for almost six months.

In the meantime, Williams’ landlord evicted her, and she used a good chunk of her welfare check to pay for storage of her belongings. She slept in a station wagon for a while, spent a few nights with friends and moved into a shelter for a couple weeks.

She never stopped pestering Carpenter, spending cigarette money for pay phones, bumming quarters from friends; secretaries in the district attorney’s office began to recognize her voice.

Williams says she just asked that someone listen to a tape of her testimony at the parole hearing, which had been sent to the district attorney’s office.

In January, citing undisclosed new evidence, Carpenter filed charges of sexual assault and assault with a deadly weapon against Mumphrey.

In March, a Municipal Court judge ordered Mumphrey to stand trial later this year. In the courtroom, Williams says she felt lightheaded, but her body sat like lead as she tried to rise from her seat.

And the vow she made to one of the many district attorneys over the months of badgering came back to her:

“If I can’t shoot him, you’re going to prosecute him. If I can’t get my own justice, you’re going to have to do it.”