ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Friday, January 26, 1996 TAG: 9601260070
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: B1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: LAURENCE HAMMACK STAFF WRITER
It was 2 in the morning in a bad part of Roanoke, when a man driving a van with tinted windows slowed down near a woman walking alone on Patterson Avenue Southwest.
Like all the other men who had stopped that night, this one was looking for sex.
The 32-year-old prostitute had already had sex with four men and had earned $100 for her night's work. She was "off duty" and tired, she said, but decided to accept the man's offer of a ride home.
"He was really nice-looking; I didn't see any reason to be afraid of him," she told a jury Thursday.
The woman climbed into the van. What happened next was something a jury seldom hears. The five women and seven men who listened to the woman's story in Roanoke Circuit Court were asked to decide: What happens when a prostitute cries rape?
For more than an hour on the morning of June 18, 1995, the woman testified, Harry Lee Thompson held her captive in his van, forcing her to have sex and perform oral sex on him after he held a knife to her throat.
When he was done, she said, he forced her from the van and drove away, leaving her naked in the dark street.
That the woman would even tell her story to police, much less a jury, is unusual. Assistant Commonwealth's Attorney Greg Phillips could recall no other case like it. After all, who would believe a convicted prostitute, especially one who was in an area where most people assume that a woman on the street is selling her body?
But this one was telling the truth, Phillips said.
"I make no apologies for [the victim] being a prostitute," he told the jury in his opening arguments. "But the long and the short of it is that the fact that she is a prostitute does not justify Mr. Thompson's actions that night, and that is why we are here today."
Thompson, 29, maintained his innocence. He admitted that he picked the woman up, but testified that she consented to sex. A professional photographer with a college degree, his testimony was articulate, his appearance immaculate.
He said he left the woman on the street after they had had sex and she became upset when he did not pay her enough. "I was pretty scared," he testified. "I didn't want to be caught in that situation."
Thompson's testimony came as no surprise to Phillips. "How easy is it to say, `Let's go before a jury and say, "She's a whore; of course she consented; that's what she does for a living.'''''
But why, Phillips asked the jury, would a prostitute go to the police - the people who had put her in jail before - unless her story was true?
"There are so many times that the criminal justice system has taken [the victim] and locked her up," he said. "And now she's sitting before a jury of 12 people and asking, 'Does it work both ways?'''
But the woman's record - one conviction for drugs, three for prostitution and a fourth charge pending - made her vulnerable to the character attack that came from defense attorney Gary Lumsden.
Lumsden challenged most of the woman's account, including her admission that she had slept with more than 1,000 men in her two years of working the streets.
If that were the case, Lumsden said, "This woman had to be on call 24 hours a day; she was a round-the-clock service."
As Phillips did for the prostitute, Lumsden made no apologies for his client's judgment. "He clearly put himself in a position where a nightmare like this could occur," Lumsden said.
Leaving a woman naked in the street "admittedly is not gentlemanly conduct," the lawyer said, "but that is also not rape."
When the jury got the case about 3:30 p.m., there was one fact they had not heard: Thompson also is charged with raping a second prostitute three weeks after the June incident, allegedly in the same manner as the offense described Thursday. That case is scheduled to be tried later.
As the jury began to deliberate, both Thompson and the woman were returned to the Roanoke City Jail. He has been unable to make a $10,000 bail since his arrest last August; she has said she prefers life behind bars to the one she lived on the street.
Back in their cells, they waited for a decision that never came.
After deliberating nearly four hours, jurors announced that they were hopelessly deadlocked. The judge declared a mistrial, and the question that had so polarized 12 people will be for a different jury to decide, on a different day.
LENGTH: Medium: 84 linesby CNB