The Trial

Posted on May 18, 2004 in Justice The Orange

“I’m going to fuck you up,” [Haidl] adds. “Don’t be gay, Kyle. . . . Don’t be weak, Kyle.”

Where else can a sixteen year old girl be drugged into unconsciousness and raped by three young men who included the son of an Orange County assistant sheriff? Where else can a videotape of such an incident be construed as evidence of the girl’s promiscuity? Where else can defense attorneys get away with telling the jurors that the case against eighteen year old Greg Haidl and his two buddies, Keith Spann and Kyle Nachreine is nothing more than a police vendetta against the trio?! Here in the darkness of the Orange.

To defend his son, Haidl brought in a team of seven lawyers who specialize in getting cops who have been caught beating suspects on videotape off — including a few involved in the infamous Simi Valley acquittal of the four monsters in black who beat Rodney King before a national audience. They are making the sixteen year old victim of the three late adolescents scions of OC law enforcement into a slut and an adultress who consented to being brutally poked in several places including the mouth, the vagina, and the rectum. And it looks like they are going to get away with it.

On the witness stand, nurse Patricia Young testified that Doe’s tongue and head were sore and that there were patches of redness in her throat. During a genital inspection, she said, “there were so many tears” that she could see many without the aid of a scope. She discovered 10 “jagged” tears in the rectum alone.

When it was Barnett’s turn to cross-examine Young, he pounced. He proposed that the injuries could be caused by either consensual or non-consensual sex.

“Right,” said Young. [OC Weekly 7 May 2004]

The job, of course, is to confuse the jurors, to make them believe that a reasonable doubt exists. Of course, no such thing will be proved. What will happen is that the defense attornies will put them into an anxious swoon, provoke them into a hung verdict at worse, an acquittal at even worse than that. Just enough of the twelve — who if trying three young Latinos or African Americans would almost certainly demand a maximum sentence — will look at the three “poor, misunderstood boys” and cast their ballot for acquittal. Or else they will wonder if their names will go on a list for future harassment by Orange County law enforcement officers. It doesn’t help that the prosecutor brought in a “nonexpert witness” to testify to the videotape’s authenticity. It almost looks like a deliberate screwup.

“It was planned not by them, but by her”, insisted one of the lawyers. Yes, she persuaded them to rape her with a pool cue and a lighted cigarette as shown in the video. The kind of people who will buy this story also buy the logic of this Worldnet story which puts the blame for Abu Ghraib entirely on women in the armed forces. Can such people exist? my readers must gasp.

They do, here in the darkness of the Orange where George W. Bush is seen as a saint.

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You can keep up with the trial at the Orange County Weekly.