So, in case you’re interested in what the New York State Unified Court System wasted what is probably a ridiculous amount of time and tax dollars on this week (not to mention I, personally am out over $20 for parking and whatnot – though they did buy us lunch on Thursday because we were sequestered while deliberating), here’s the gist of what it was all about. Before I go on, I will say that everybody involved on the court side of things seemed to understand what a pain in the ass jury duty is, and they seemed to go out of their way to try and make it as positive an experience as possible.
Anyhow, back in October of 2014 an undercover state trooper went to a “Spa” on the north side of Syracuse (not the worst part of town, but not exactly high-end, either) and got a massage from a 50’ish year old Chinese woman (after this was over – we were admonished not to do any research on anything related to the case while the trial was going on, which, while admittedly being tempted, I respected – I looked up the arrest, and she was apparently 53 at the time) who didn’t speak English (she had an interpreter in court), and he (the cop) claimed she offered him a hand job (or, in official court parlance, “manual masturbation”) at the end of the massage as part of the financial arrangement (which he turned down). He then claimed to ask for oral sex, to which she shook her head and said no (one of a handful of English words that she knows).
As part of this, the cop went in with a recording device in his pants pocket (as an aside, these are apparently cellular-based devices that upload to a server and also allow other parties to listen in live, so if you plan to do something nefarious, you may want to invest in one of the devices available here). So we had to sit through something like 45 minutes worth of recording – which was about 40 minutes worth of silence or him walking down the street in squeaky shoes. They played this recording back on a crappy Dell laptop using crappy Dell desktop speakers using crappy Windows Media Player. You’d think they’d have something more elaborate than that – or at least use something like Audacity that makes it easier to scrub back and forth and pinpoint exact locations in the recording, but, no, they do not.
Since the defendant no-speakie the English, they communicated primarily through hand gestures (you can probably imagine what those were – part of the voir dire was the ADA asking us if we knew what this gesture meant – turns out, I do indeed know that one). This does not make for riveting listening.
So, anyhow, she took him into a massage room, and went out again as he took all his clothes off and laid on his front (uncovered) and then she oiled him up and rubbed him (I kind of wondered if this guy was married or not – “what’d you do at work today, honey?”). This went on for like 20 minutes (mostly silence on the recording – again, really compelling to listen to). She asked if he liked it hard or not and he said the harder the better. So she spread his legs apart and got up on the table between them so she could apply more pressure (and he says she grabbed his junk a bit). Then she had him turn over.
The case turned on one portion of the recording, when, after he rolls over, you can hear him say “Is that included? Is that part of it – you’ll do that for me too?” At which point he claims she nodded her head and said yes (it was hard to hear, but I think we did hear the “yes” from her – we did ask to hear this portion of the recording over again).
According to him, at this point in time, she was grabbing his junk with one hand, and with her other she made a fist and gestured in an up and down motion (aka, the universal jerk off signal).
According to her, however, it was when she started to massage the front of his arms that he said this.
Next, he said he pointed to his mouth and his penis and she shook her head and said no. According to her, he pointed to her mouth and his penis, and she said no. Either way, it appears that a blow job was not up for discussion.
So then she massaged his feet for a bit, and then the massage was over, at which point she left the room while he got dressed, went out to the lobby, said the “code phrase” to alert his supervisor who was listening out on the street someplace and left as the other trooper came in and arrested her.
So it would appear that there is so little actual criminal activity in the Syracuse area (though Syracuse had NY State’s 8th highest violent crime rate in 2013 and 12 of 22 homicides went unsolved in 2014) that the New York State Police have nothing better to do than arrest some soft-spoken tiny little Chinese woman for a rub and tug (which, I found out after this was over is an actual thing that people pay for – go figure. I actually found the most reference to this sort of thing in some online “body builder” forums, for some reason I don’t understand, but these people seem a bit odd to me anyway. I’ve never had a “professional” massage – let alone an “Asian massage” – so I had no frame of reference as to whether or not this sort of thing was normal). And then send it to a 3-day jury trial, that has to cost a ton of money (my assumption was that they would have to have tried to plea this out to a fine and probation or something, but of course we weren’t privy to any of that information).
In order to try and impeach the testimony of the trooper, the defense attorney (who – if my years of watching teevee and movie courtroom dramas are any indication – was not the sharpest lawyer in the world) basically said that pretty much all cops are bigoted liars, and that cops killed that kid in Ferguson and choked that guy in NY City to death and didn’t get arrested but Chinese-American police officer Peter Liang was indicted for manslaughter (among other things) in the shooting death of Akai Gurley, so clearly the system is predisposed to hate Asian people. Or something.
He also pointed to 16 “shocking” inconsistencies in the testimony of the cop between the preliminary hearing in December and his testimony this week. This included things like in Dec, he gave the number of the street address as 704, and in Feb, he said 705. (which is what it is), and that back then he said he’d been a trooper for 19 years, but this week he said it was 18 years, and went he first went to the spa, he said they told him to come back in 20 minutes, but on the recording it was actually 40 minutes, and that he testified that the “code phrase” was “I can’t wait to tell my friends” whereas what he said on the recording was “I can’t wait to tell my friend Buck about this.”
In the end, it just didn’t seem reasonable that after having everything on his back (neck, shoulders, arms, back, ass, legs) massaged that he’d say “you’ll do that for me, I don’t want that” about having the front of his arms massaged. I really wish the cop had made things a little easier by saying something like “why are you grabbing my dick? Is that part of the massage?” or something like that. And, while you’d think a trained police officer would get all the details down prior to testifying, a few very minor discrepancies in his testimony didn’t really seem like enough to determine that he was lying (hell, I’ve been known to forget a thing or two once in a while).
In his closing argument, the defense attorney basically said the cop was untrustworthy and couldn’t be believed, but that even if you believed him, the offer of a hand job was complimentary – like getting peanuts or a free soda on an airline flight (really, he said this).
Anyhow, the judge instructed us that if we believed that “manual masturbation” was a sex act and that it had been offered in exchange for money, we’d have to vote guilty.
The jury was three guys and three females. One female was probably in her 20s, the other maybe 30, and the third probably in her 40s. You can imagine how awkward that was. It’s pretty hard to talk about this kind of thing without actually talking about this kind of thing.
We went around on this for quite a while, I think because we all thought this was ridiculous bullshit and had no desire to see this woman get thrown in jail or deported or whatever over this shit. But they said we weren’t supposed to consider any of that, or how stupid we thought it was.
So, in the end, we reluctantly felt we had no choice but to vote guilty.
When it was over, I felt dirty and kind of sick over the whole thing (the night before, I had a really difficult time sleeping in thinking about all this).
On the bright side, they said I’m off the hook for jury duty for at least 10 years.
Now, I will say that the judge in this case seemed like a really nice guy, and he seemed to go out of his way to be patient with the defense attorney, who as I said didn’t exactly strike me as Clarence Darrow. And in my post-trial research, I found that this judge is in charge of the prostitution cases for Syracuse’s Human Trafficking Court.
The new court, established late last fall in Syracuse as part of New York State Chief Judge Jonathan Lippman’s statewide Human Trafficking Intervention Initiative, takes a new tactic by treating those arrested for prostitution as victims, rather than criminals. In lieu of jail time, defendants are offered a plea deal that provides six months of counseling and social services. Upon successful completion of the program, the court will dismiss the case.
“We can provide an opportunity for these women to have some hope for themselves,” said Limpert. “We can get them mental health treatment, drug treatment if they need it. We help them get identification because sometimes they don’t have it and get them work so that they can become productive citizens and not be on the streets anymore.”
Though the court has only existed for a few months, Judge Limpert is optimistic about what he’s seen so far. He estimates that about 80-percent of defendants have successfully completed the rehabilitation program, though more time is needed to know the long term success of the new court. In the meantime, human rights groups are applauding a system that no longer treats prostitution as a victimless crime.
So maybe this was all part of that and something good will come of it for this woman after all.
In other words, I’m hoping for a Happy Ending.
