No Jail Time After High-Profile Child Sex Abuse Charges Filed

BEN P.

Ben came to me and he had a real problem. The lawyers that he was working with were telling him that he needed to take a deal and that he needed to go to prison and that there was absolutely no chance for him to stay out of prison or to be successful at a trial. Ben wanted another lawyer, not just to tell him what he wanted to hear, but to look at the case and see if these two other fairly well-accomplished lawyers were wrong about his case. So, I took a look at it, not in an attempt to buy it, but to see if I could craft a defense which I believed to be at odds with what the other attorneys were telling him. I suggested to Ben if he were to retain me, this is how I'd move forward with his case. I explained the Berlin Defense System to him, explained the strengths and weakness of his case and proposed to him a very clear, practical, easy-to-understand defense of his case and how we would move forward with that.
Just to give you some perspective, this is the Baptist church camp rape case that got international attention. The allegation was that my client, while working as a cook at this Baptist Church Camp, convinced one of the campers, a 13-year-old girl, to go into the private part of his cabin, where he then tied her up and then vaginally and anally raped her and forced himself on her orally.

So, my client, obviously is pretty scared because he's looking at life in prison plus lewd molestation plus the forcible oral sodomy so he's looking at 20 and 20 and life and life. So, two life sentences plus 40 years is what he was looking at. The position of the district attorney was 25 years in prison. The position of the two attorneys that were currently on the case was that they believed they could convince the district attorney to agree to 10 years in prison.
My position was on it, "Ben, what do you want to see happen? What's your idea of success? What's your belief of a successful resolution?" And Ben told me, "I will take any deal that does not involve prison, or we are going to trial." And I understood those as my marching orders. That is what I had to do to satisfy this client. Either go to trial or get him a deal that did not involve him doing a day in prison.

Now, Ben suffered from a ton of co-morbidities and illnesses. He was legally blind. He needed a cane to walk and move around. He was a diabetic with an insulin pump. He had peripheral neuropathy. The list just went on and on and on and Ben was convinced that given all of these very, very serious medical issues that were going on with him, that the Department of Corrections would not be able to keep up with them and that he would die in prison for insufficient medical care. Ben had a very complicated medical story that was top of mind for him in all stages of his case.
Ben believed that any time in prison, even a year in prison, would result in his death so he was firm in his position on what would be success. So as with every case, we employed the 10-step Berlin Defense System. We broke down the case from top to bottom. We had multiple client meetings. We poured over this evidence and we prepared the case for preliminary hearing. We worked with the civil attorneys that were defending the Baptist Church Camp and the church that was involved that supplied Ben as a cook. Now, they didn't want to help us. Now, they wanted everything that we had to have. They wanted every big piece of evidence that we had.
They wanted my advice and counsel on how to defend the case, but they didn't want anybody knowing that they had anything to do with us. So, they wanted to suck from us, but they didn't want to help us. Ben had some serious financial issues. Ben needed an expert. So, as we worked to try to find an expert regionally, going all the way from Texas to Kansas City, over to Albuquerque, all the way over to Nashville, trying to find an expert to assist us in the case. Ben had a real problem affording those experts who were willing to assist. So, we reached out, of course, to the civil attorneys to try to get them to help. They said that they didn't want to help us, they wouldn't help us, they wouldn't share an expert and that even though they were going to go out there and acquire their own experts, they would not assist us in any way.
At that moment we knew we were on our own and that we had to work and figure out what was best for us, knowing that we weren't going to have any help from the civil defense attorneys. That being the case, I started to work on the DA and the plaintiff's lawyers. The thought was that if the plaintiff's lawyers could secure a conviction at the criminal level, that they had an 85-90% solution for their civil case. However, if they were to lose at trial on the criminal case, not them personally but the district attorney was to lose, and I was to win, that they had an uphill climb in front of them, one that they didn't want to have to undertake. The plaintiff’s lawyers had to rely upon some rural assistant district attorney to try the case and fight it against an individual, an attorney that was an expert in sex crimes. Well, they didn't want to see that go down either.
So, as I presented to the prosecution an option in which my client would plead guilty to everything charged but the prosecutor must give him a straight suspended sentence with no prison time. I gave the prosecution those very arguments that they needed to take to the family's lawyers, the victim's lawyers, to sell them on this deal. Well, that's exactly what happened. The prosecution came back, and both the district attorney and plaintiff’s lawyers accepted the terms that I sold them on. We went, and we plead the case to those terms.

The fallout from this was massive. The headlines made international news. It was all over the state. The prosecutor ended up getting fired the next week. Legislators tried to have the judge removed from office. Needless to say, an individual getting a 15-year probation sentence, not a day in prison, for the alleged anal and vaginal rape and oral sodomy of a 13-year-old church camp girl, raised a lot of attention. There was a lot of fallout from the case, but I'll tell you one thing; that's one happy client and some of our best work to date.

Have You Been Charged With a Sex Crime in the Tulsa, OK Area?

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