Jury Deliberations Begin in Key Army Sex Case

As a court-martial jury began deliberating the principal case in the Army’s sexual-misconduct scandal, an attorney for the accused drill sergeant warned Thursday that a rape conviction would invite a flood of unfounded sex harassment charges from women and destroy Army discipline.

An attorney for Staff Sgt. Delmar Simpson, who is charged with 19 rapes, said that if Simpson were found guilty “on facts like these, then you’re going to be sending a message” to the Army that “any woman can come forward and say she was raped without corroborating evidence.”

Discipline would then collapse because if a drill sergeant says, “ ‘Run up that hill,’ I’m going to say, ‘You harassed me,’ ” argued attorney Frank J. Spinner.

His warning came in closing arguments of a 2-week-old court-martial that has become the main event in the sexual-misconduct investigation that began at Maryland’s Aberdeen Proving Ground and has since spread throughout much of the service.

Simpson, 32, is charged with 54 crimes that stem from his supervision, along with other drill sergeants, of hundreds of young women in an Army mechanic-training school in 1995 and 1996. He has already pleaded guilty to consensual sex with five of the six women who have accused him of rape, and he faces a long prison term in connection with those pleas.

In the prosecution’s closing arguments, Capt. Theresa J. Gallagher portrayed Simpson as a “criminal in a green uniform,” who created an environment of fear, intimidation and control” in the 143rd Ordnance Battalion.

She outlined how, over 20 months, Simpson dug to find the female trainees’ physical and psychological weaknesses, then played on them to extort sex from them.

In its final summary, the defense systematically challenged the credibility of the six women, stressing that most of them had come forward late and without corroborating evidence, and suggesting that they had motives to try to undo their powerful superior.

An accuser from Alabama, Spinner said, had gone absent without leave twice before the Army called her at home to ask if Simpson had raped her.

“Why lie? Maybe because she’s glad not to be court-martialed for desertion,” Spinner said. By cooperating with the Army, “he’s her ticket out.”

Spinner contended that another accuser, who says Simpson raped her eight times during a period of weeks, was essentially a girlfriend in a relationship that soured. But he told the six-member court-martial panel that even so, the woman had told a friend after the eight rape incidents that Simpson was “the best drill sergeant to have.”

Spinner called attention to testimony that identified two other accusers as liars, and that another had told a friend she was interested in Simpson.

And he brought a heavy upholstered chair from the counsel’s table to the front of the jury box in an attempt to show that it would be difficult to force a woman to have sex in a chair, as one of the accusers said Simpson had twice done to her.

A pivotal element in the case is whether the jury considered some of the cases to fall under the military’s definition of “constructive rape.” In this kind of assault, a woman is considered to be raped although she hasn’t fought back, because she believes that resistance would be futile or would invite grievous bodily injury.

The prosecution maintains that many of the cases fit this definition. But Spinner argued that in many of the cases, the women gave no hint at all of their displeasure.

Defining rape this way, he said, was a “paternalistic notion” that women “are too weak or ignorant to know what to do when a man tells them he wants to have sex with them.” It suggests they are “unable to distinguish between an order to run up a hill and an order to lie on a bed.”

Spinner disputed the prosecution’s portrayal of drill sergeants as “Pac-men”--with great power, access and control--who would “gobble up all the trainees.”

The case has been followed closely by women’s advocates, and is likely to provoke an outcry if Simpson appears to get off too lightly. But some black leaders, who contend that the Army has singled out black soldiers for charges, may challenge a verdict that they consider harsh.