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March 09, 2005
Jury unable to reach verdict in child-sex case
An obviously tired and despondent jury shuffled late Tuesday afternoon back into a Jasper County courtroom, no closer to a verdict on the guilt or innocence of accused child molester Steven Gartin than it had been at the start of deliberation six hours and 20 minutes earlier.
One juror stared straight ahead at no one in particular, his brow furrowed and jaw set in apparent disgust with one or more of his fellow jurors, as Circuit Judge Jon Dermott declared a mistrial, thanked the jurors for their efforts and dismissed them.
Gartin, 54, appeared relieved, even defiant, as one of his attorneys explained to him after the jurors left the courtroom that the Jasper County prosecutor's office was not going to drop the charges against him, and that a new trial date would have to be set.
"I bet you anything I'm gonna win that one," Gartin said loud enough for the assistant prosecutors who had tried his case to hear. "They got nothin'."
What the prosecution presented as evidence in the two-day trial that ended Tuesday was a 15-year-old girl's testimony that Gartin had repeated sexual intercourse with her in 2001 and 2002, when she was 12; his own wife's testimony that she had caught him and the girl in a state of undress in July 2002 in a bedroom of the couple's Joplin home; and several letters he allegedly had written to the girl and one he had written to his wife after his arrest nearly three years ago.
The purported letter to his wife, Vicki Gartin, acknowledged a sexual relationship with the girl, blamed the girl for initiating the sex the vast majority of the time, and attempted to justify it by claiming that he was only protecting the girl from the risk of pregnancy that sex with someone else might pose.
The prosecution called a handwriting expert to testify that the letters were in Steven Gartin's handwriting and a fingerprint expert to testify that his handprints were on the letters.
Gartin's attorneys, Charles Genisio and Mitchell Cross, attacked the testimony of the handwriting expert as the opinion of someone who is skilled in an imperfect art and not a science. They also argued that the presence of their client's fingerprints on the letters was to be expected because the legal pad on which they were written had been in the Gartins' home for some time before the July 2002 incident that led to his arrest.
Gartin took the witness stand Tuesday morning to deny ever having sexual relations with the girl and ever having written the letters. He was the only witness called by the defense.
"I did not have sex with that little girl, sir," he told assistant prosecutor Todd Hawkins during cross-examination.
"She's lying through her teeth," he said at another point.
Gartin was tried on three counts of statutory rape and one count of statutory sodomy.
The girl testified Monday that, among other times, Gartin had intercourse with her on July 13, 2002, the day his wife discovered them together in a state of undress; some time around Halloween of 2001; and about the time she turned 12 in August 2001. She also testified that he put her hand on his penis that first time he initiated sex with her in August or September of 2001, the basis for the sodomy charge.
The failure of the jury to reach a verdict on any of the four counts suggests that one or more jurors were willing to acquit Gartin on all the charges. The jury was composed of six men and six women, with an age range from 25 to 80 and an average age of 49.
The two jurors a Globe reporter was able to reach as they left the courts building in Joplin after being dismissed both declined to discuss what had happened in deliberation. Both seemed angry with what had transpired.
In closing arguments Tuesday, Hawkins asked jurors to restore the trust that had been destroyed for both the girl and Gartin's wife by the defendant's actions, and assistant prosecutor Nate Dally asked them to tell the girl with their verdict that "it's not her fault that any of this happened."
But Genisio argued that Vicki Gartin had not seen what she claimed she saw on the day she walked in on the girl and her husband, that the girl repeatedly denied having sex with the defendant before eventually changing her story, and that there was no physical evidence that any sexual abuse had taken place.
Posted by Nealus at March 9, 2005 09:09 PM
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