Rape Or Consensual? Man's Fate In Hands Of Jury
MINNEAPOLIS (WCCO) -- With a loud clang of a cell door slamming closed, defendant Duncan Osoro reflects back on his 16 months behind bars. Clearly, it was not the life Osoro dreamed of when the young man left his native Kenya for Minnesota six years ago.
"You are just sitting there, waiting, watching your life, not knowing what is going to be tomorrow," said Osoro, describing his ordeal.
Home for Osoro was the Hennepin County jail where he was held pending not one, but two trials for an alleged rape.
"I didn't do anything wrong but I'm sitting in jail," proclaimed Osoro.
In August 2007, Osoro met a woman at Karma nightclub in downtown Minneapolis. The two had a few drinks and then left around closing time.
Minneapolis defense attorney Joseph Fru took on Osoro's case.
"In my opening statement, I was very clear about that, you know? This was a one-night stand that went wrong," said Fru.
However, to police and Hennepin County prosecutors, it was a case of rape. The woman filed charges saying she couldn't remember anything between 2:00 a.m. and 10:00 a.m. the next morning, when she woke up bloodied in a grassy area near 49th and Lyndale Avenue North.
Investigators developed a DNA profile of semen left on the victim and compared it to a convicted offender database. The following May 2008, Osoro was arrested based on the DNA match and booked into the county jail.
According to Hennepin County Attorney Mike Freeman, "medically, she was badly injured in two areas of her body. That's not the kind of activity people have in consensual sex, normally."
Defense attorney Fru built his case around a sexual encounter that was consensual. The case went to trial in March 2009 and ended in a hung jury. That's when Freeman consulted his staff and decided to re-file charges against Osoro.
He was convinced his prosecutor would get a conviction a second time around.
"Justice required us to go forward. We looked at it carefully," Freeman explained.
Defense attorney Fru said it was a mistake based on testimony and evidence presented at the initial trial.
"I'm sorry to say this, but I think that the investigation was very amateurish. It was haphazard. It was, I mean for lack of a better word, it was a sham," said Fru.
The second attempt to prove Osoro guilty of the alleged rape came last December. Two days before Christmas, with final arguments completed, jurors began their deliberations, already filled with doubts.
Cameron Boyd was among the 12 jurors and the jury's foreperson.
"The lost pictures and the shoddy detective work. And it all just came to together. All the pieces the prosecution had to prove fell apart kind of at multiple points," he said.
Boyd remembers his fellow jurors wrestling with the issue of which witness was more credible -- the defendant or the alleged victim.
"Going to bed the previous night I thought to myself, 'I will not in clear conscious be able to convict this man,'" said Boyd.
Deliberations were swift and the verdict was unanimous.
"It wasn't 30 minutes and the call came in and said, 'the jury was here,'" recalled defense attorney Fru.
"I just closed my eyes and waited to hear what they were going to say," remembered Osoro.
When the judge opened the verdict, his words "not guilty" resonated throughout the courtroom.
"I really felt that not only had we served the civic duty well, but we had that case that every juror would want to be on. Where you got to do real justice and free someone who wasn't guilty," said Boyd.
County Attorney Freeman believes the 40 months spent between the initial crime and a second trial became a detriment to prosecution. It opened the door for reasonable doubt to enter juror's minds.
"We're not in the business of putting people up who are innocent of a crime to face a jury and a long sentence. We don't do that. We were convinced then and I'm convinced today that this defendant perpetrated this crime," said Freeman.
Jurors, however, were not convinced. So, Duncan Osoro found himself walking out of custody after 16 months in jail and back into a classroom.
He was educated in the system of justice, though strangely expressing little bitterness for the price paid.
"I can't control the way you think about me, so it's up to you to decide which way you think or what you believe," said Osoro.
