Rape Trial in Its Last Phase

The well-dressed defendants with folded hands aren’t the young men jurors should think about as they consider their verdict in an Orange County rape case, the prosecutor said Tuesday in his closing argument.

Instead, said Deputy Dist. Atty. Dan Hess, the jury should focus on the young men as they appear on a 2-year-old videotape the jurors have watched -- giggling, he says, as they rape an unconscious 16-year-old girl.

“These are little boys pulling the wings off of a butterfly,” Hess said. “They’re doing it because they can.”

But defense lawyers, who started their closing arguments and are scheduled to finish them today, warned the jury that there is too much reasonable doubt to convict their clients. The tape is missing crucial minutes, possibly as a result of tampering, they contended, and the alleged victim’s testimony was loaded with inconsistencies.

“They only have two pieces of evidence: the video and Jane Doe,” said attorney Joseph G. Cavallo. “Neither has any credibility.”

Prosecutor Hess walked through each of the 24 counts against the defendants: Gregory Scott Haidl, now 18, and Kyle Joseph Nachreiner and Keith James Spann, both 19.

All three defendants and the alleged victim lived in Rancho Cucamonga at the time, but the incident is alleged to have occurred in the Corona del Mar home of Haidl’s father, a wealthy, high-ranking Orange County sheriff’s official.

If convicted on all charges -- 23 felony counts of rape and penetration by a foreign object, and one count of assault with a deadly weapon -- each defendant could get up to 55 years in prison. The jury will also have the option of convicting them on misdemeanor charges.

Hess displayed for the jurors still photographs from the video that he said corresponded to each count, and twice displayed poster-size enlargements of the pictures.

As with the video itself during the trial, the public was not allowed to see the photos. Instead, it heard the prosecutor’s descriptions, more graphic Tuesday than ever before in the two-month trial.

After having sex with the apparently unconscious girl in two positions on a white wicker couch, Hess said, the boys move her to a pool table and start inserting objects into her with increasing force. They sexually assault her with both ends of a pool cue, Hess said, at one point shoving it inside her nearly five inches.

“It’s for their sexual arousal. It’s for their sexual gratification,” Hess said. “But it’s also for the abuse. That’s the part they really enjoy.”

The prosecutor said that the activities with the pool cue, which could have caused severe injuries, justify the deadly-weapon assault charges.

Although each of the defendants does not participate equally in each activity, Hess said, they are all criminally liable for every count because they helped each other: Nachreiner giving her the drink that prosecutors say knocked her out, then having sex with her, Spann having sex with her on the couch and pool table and Haidl filming and inserting some of the objects.

“One for all, all for one, they are all committing these crimes,” Hess said.

Hess noted that the alleged victim, now 18, said she remembered virtually nothing of the encounter.

By contrast, the defense lawyers who spoke Tuesday focused on Jane Doe. What their clients knew of the girl, they said, was that she had fooled around with all three defendants the night before the incident, having sex with at least two of them.

She returned the next night, Cavallo said, knowing she would likely have sex with all of them.

“It’s not like she was going down [there] to play chess or tiddlywinks at 1 o’clock in the morning,” Cavallo said.

The encounter was consensual, and Jane Doe was alert enough to tell them to stop at any point, the defense lawyers said. But the prosecutor is using the videotape to “bamboozle” the jurors into believing the incident was a brutal gang rape rather than a consensual encounter, Cavallo added.

“The tape is not pretty,” he said. “But you don’t have three criminals here.... It was an environment created by four people, four stupid teenagers who did stupid things that night.”

Both defense lawyers who spoke Tuesday attacked what they called inconsistencies in Jane Doe’s testimony -- “quite frankly, we don’t have posters big enough” to list all of her lies, Cavallo said -- and the integrity of the videotape. There was ample opportunity to doctor it, deleting crucial minutes between scenes, Cavallo said.

The jury is expected to start deliberating today, after the final closing argument and the prosecution’s rebuttal statement.