Rep. Parker Seeks Change in PA Sexual Assault Rules

By PATRICK COBBS

Staff Writer

State Representative Cherelle Parker (D., 200th) wants to bring Pennsylvania’s rules for trying sexual assault cases in line with the rest of the country. She held a hearing February 12 at the Lutheran Theological Seminary at Philadelphia for a bill that would allow expert testimony in these cases to help enlighten jurors who, many at the hearing said, typically hold skewed beliefs about sexual assault and rape.

“Rape is looked upon as a different kind of crime,” said Captain John Darby, commander of the Philadelphia Special Victims Unit. “The only crime in which victims must prove their innocence.”

According to both Philadelphia Assistant District Attorney Deborah Harley and Lynn Hecht Schafran of Legal Momentum, a national legal defense fund for the rights of women and girls, Pennsylvania and Minnesota are the only two states that forbid expert testimony in these cases.

As a result, according to them and other panelists at the hearing, the prevalent “myths” of rape are what primarily guide jurors in their courtroom decisions. These myths typically depict a stranger attacking the victim out of nowhere, and they consider total resistance by the victim to be the ideal response to the crime. 

But behaviors like physical resistance are not necessarily normal in rape cases, many at the hearing said, and often the victims find themselves on trial in order to reconcile those misconceptions.

“We don’t typically ask victims of other crimes to defend why they don’t fight back,” said Jill Maier, director of counseling services of Women Organized Against Rape.

In court cases where there is a delay in reporting the sexual assault or rape, a judge can instruct the jury to consider that delay as evidence against the victim’s credibility, Harley said.

Yet nationally and locally, reporting on rape and sexual assault cases is chronically low, according to Captain John Darby. The US Dept of Justice estimated that between 1992 and 2000 only 36 percent of rapes, 34 percent of attempted rapes, and 26 percent of other sexual assaults even made it to the attention of authorities. And those numbers have not improved since then, Darby said.

In addition, according to Darby, 63 percent of all rapes are committed by a person the victim knows, and 20 percent of all the reported rapes in Philadelphia were not reported until at least a week after the assault occurred.

But because of the state’s prohibition against expert testimony in sexual assault cases, these kinds of facts rarely make it into the trials, according to the panelists. Most damaging is the loss of information on what constitutes “normal” victim behavior, they said. Not having physical evidence of the rape, not reporting the crime quickly, not appearing to have an appropriate emotional reaction to the assault in court – “these are not unusual behaviors, these are common behaviors,” said Jill Maier.

The impact of not combating these misconceptions in court was apparent in the trials of Jeffrey Marsalis, Philadelphia’s so called “playboy rapist,” according to Deborah Harley. Marsalis was accused of drugging and raping 10 women he met on Match.com between 2003 and 2005, though Harley believes he raped at lease 21 women, and Darby said the number could be as high as 40. One of the reasons prosecuting the case was difficult, Harley told the House Rules Committee, was that several of the women had contact with him after the assaults occurred. This was difficult to explain to the jury as a common behavior without expert testimony, Harley said.

Marsalis was acquitted of rape charges in 2006 filed by three different women, and in 2007 he was also acquitted of the most serious rape charges relating to those 10 victims, but was found guilty of sexual assault. An Idaho court extradited him from a Pennsylvania prison in 2009 and found him guilty of a rape he committed there in 2005.

It was the Marsalis case that inspired Parker to first initiate this bill in 2007 but that effort died in the House Judiciary Committee in December of that year. The same committee is now reviewing the current version of the bill.

But Parker got a surprise boost last Friday when House Majority Leader Todd Eachus (D., Luzerne County) sat in on part of the hearing.

“I wish every member of the House were here today,” Eachus said to the panelists. And, turning to Parker, “we’ve got to move this law along… you’ve got a commitment from me to do that.”

Parker called Eachus’ support a “major plus” for the bill, but she still thinks it will face an uphill battle to win House and Senate approval.

“Even with our membership, I would dare say, education is going to be needed,” she said.