The week before the inauguration, I served on a jury for a statutory rape trial. I have served on one previous jury, and this seemed like an ordinary sort of trial, except that a crucial component of the defense involved an unmet need for medical care -- which ultimately resulted in the accused being found not guilty due to reasonable doubt.
"Statutory rape" in this situation did not mean forcible rape. The charge was consensual sex with an underage girl. The girl, "Lisa," age 17 last summer/fall when these events transpired (now 18), was a habitual runaway (6 times in the past year) who had during some of the runaway periods worked as a prostitute. Her cousin and her friend both, separately, had encouraged her to participate in it because it was fast money. She had run away repeatedly because her mother's girlfriend was abusing her, and her mother was leaving her and her sister for days at a time with no food and no phone. (Her father is dead.)
During one of the periods when she was gone, she met the accused - I'll call him James. James is a 35 year old, homeless ex-convict. She met him for the first time at a bus stop and then ran into him again and they became friends. She and James took a liking to one another and began hanging out together. He helped show her the ropes of life on the streets. At times, he tried to get her into a better situation - he tried taking her home, but that wouldn't take, and he also tried taking her to live with his mother in a city an hour away, but his mother wouldn't put up with that either.
Lisa was located in the middle of the summer and returned home, after first going to a group home because her mother refused to have her come home again. Lisa told her CPS worker that she and James did not have sex, but a couple of days later told a police officer (who visited her because it was a missing-persons case) that they did have sex. Lisa and James were both subsequently interviewed by the police, and we heard tapes of the interviews. (The police told James that Lisa was pregnant, which was untrue, in an attempt to get him to confess to the sex; he did not.)
Lisa testified to us that they had sex. She also stated that she and James love one another and are planning to get married when she turns 18 (which she just did).
When it came time for the defense to present their case, the defense attorney stated that James has a severe form of hypospadias, which is a birth defect involving an unusual opening of the urethra. Hypospadias can take various forms, but in James's case, the whole bottom of the head of his penis is split open (we got to see a photo) which, he testified, makes sex too painful because when erect a lot of nerves are exposed. So, he said, he just doesn't have sex. He said he tried twice, at age 19 and at 27, and both times it hurt too much so he stopped. (Lisa testified that she did not notice anything unusual about James's penis.)
Hypospadias is treatable through surgery, and most baby boys who are born with it would have it treated. But James was born into a poor family and did not have the money to have it treated. He stated that in prison the doctors had told him they would not treat it because it is, in effect, an elective surgery. There is no true necessity to have it treated.
There were three male members of the jury who seemed to feel just based on who James was that he was not to be trusted. We ended up with a hung jury, but the majority of us felt that given the medical testimony there was reasonable doubt that they had had sex. It is certainly possible that they did, but given the medical condition it seemed possible that they did not.
In a country with nationalized health care, I would expect that children with a condition like James's would have the opportunity to have it treated. If so, the outcome of this jury could have been different.