Client Found Not Guilty of Lewd Molestation

BJORN

Bjorn came to me with, what seemed to be at first look an impossible case to win. The allegation was is that he had performed oral sex on his 14-year-old niece and his wife walked in on him during the act. Now Bjorn was a foreign national married to an American citizen and the report of this incident came from the niece to her parents on the way home from an overnight stay. This little girl would routinely come over and babysit at this house. Both mom and dad worked and so somebody needed to take care of the child on the weekends, during Christmas and spring breaks, holidays, where the parents still had to work and the child would be home from school.
On this particular weekend, the parents were out doing different things and needed somebody to stay at home with the kid and instead of having to take the child home to her parents, who were in Muskogee, just let the child routinely spend the night there.
Unbeknownst to my client, who is a handsome guy in his thirties, this 14-year-old girl had a crush on him and the crush became more and more serious, and Bjorn would spend a lot of time talking with her. He would be that ear that she would lean on when they would be watching TV, she would have questions for him and want to engage him in conversation and talk about boys at school. She'd do the same thing with my client’s wife, but you could tell if you were a third party just watching from afar, that the girl had stars in her eyes and the sun would rise and set on Bjorn.
Well, on the evening in question, this girl decided that she was going to kiss Bjorn. Bjorn did not respond the way her childlike mind thought he would. At the moment that Bjorn rejected her, the wife who was getting ready for work walked in to the living room and saw the kiss and rejection. Well, the little girl was afraid she was going to get in trouble. The little girl and both of these families were all Jehovah's Witnesses and so there was a religious component involved as well as the legal component, and as well as the parenting component. Well on the way home, because this little girl thought it was only a matter of time until Bjorn's wife calls up her parents and tells them what happened, does she come out and say that Bjorn advanced himself sexually upon her.
Well, they go through their religious chain of command in the Jehovah's and the Jehovah's have a mandatory reporting system and they report this allegation to DHS and law enforcement and they get involved and an investigation takes place and guess what? My client gets charged with lewd molestation and he's looking at three to 20 years in prison.

So, we go and put the preliminary hearing on and the case survives because the girl began, well let's just put it this way, she's too scared at this point to tell the truth.
At some point though, during the litigation, as I continued to conduct my investigations as we're working and preparing the case for trial, the girl finally decides that she's going to come out and tell the truth. She's going to tell the truth about what happened. Well, as is the truth, the God's honest truth, the district attorney's office doesn't believe her, or they don't care to believe her and what do they want to do? They still want to prosecute my guy. Even as this girl says this is really what happened. The prosecutor doesn't care. Doesn't care one bit. In fact, she tells me, "Matter of fact Lee, this is what I'll do for you. Instead of 10 years in prison, I'll give your guy seven years in prison, followed by three years of probation, and oh yeah, he has to register as an aggravated sex offender for the rest of his life and he's probably going to get deported."
My client's justifiable response to that was, "No. Not a chance in hell. We're going to trial." That’s exactly what we did. We tried this week-long case, jury deliberated for about an hour and a half, came back, found my client Not Guilty. He went home to his wife and kids. That's one happy client.
During the process, Bjorn was terrified. The state did not care about the truth, they only cared about the conviction and that's what we see time and time again. If a young girl makes a disclosure and then later recant, and says, "No that wasn't really what happened," it's important for you, to know the state of Oklahoma doesn't care. My client did care and fortunately, the jurors did too.

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