Twelve jurors — seven women and five men — decided today that former University of Montana football player Jordan Johnson was not guilty of “sexual intercourse without consent,” or to use the vernacular, rape. They needed just two and one-half hours to reach their verdict, an indication that the prosecution’s case was riddled with reasonable doubt.
Now — how does Jordan Johnson get his life back?
How does he recover his good name? How do he and his family recover the money they spent to defend him from a false accusation that could have resulted in decades of wrongful imprisonment?
The answer? He’ll probably never fully recover from his ordeal.
And his ordeal isn’t entirely over yet, reports the Missoulian, as the University of Montana expelled him after a university trial:
Now, said [former UM athletic director] Jim O’Day, UM needs to make a quick decision in Johnson’s case. Johnson was expelled from UM after its own internal court proceeding in the case, O’Day said, but that decision apparently was put on hold pending the outcome of the trial. Johnson remains enrolled at the school, although he was suspended from the football team after the charge was filed.
Peggy Kuhr, UM vice president for integrated communications, said Friday that university court proceedings are private and she could not discuss them.
I suspect that will be rather quickly reversed, but the fact that the university found Johnson guilty of something never can be erased from history’s memory.
Moreover, he’ll be dogged the rest of his life by assertions and insinuations that he got away with rape through clever lawyering — starting with Missoula County Attorney Fred Van Valkenberg:
“The outcome here is a not guilty verdict,” Van Valkenburg said. “It is not an innocent verdict.”
That’s how a prosecutor who loses a case smears the man the jury refused to convict. It’s unprofessional and deserves a rebuke.
But Van Valkenburg is not alone.
At the Missoulian, hundreds of comments on the story reporting the verdict are pouring in, split, it seems, between those who think justice was denied and those who had decided long before the trial that Johnson was not guilty.
Fortunately for Johnson, the jurors recognized the complexities and nuances of the case:
One of the jurors said Friday evening that “we were kind of hung up on the fact that we just couldn’t do a conviction because we weren’t sure whether Mr. Johnson was aware of whether the sex was non-consensual.”
“You just can’t convict somebody if you’re not 100 percent, or reasonably sure,” said Donna M. Aucutt, who described the 2 1/2 hours of deliberations as cordial. “It’s a sad case all the way around, with so many people affected. But you’ve just got to go with what the law says…and there was that little bit of doubt whether Mr. Johnson knew.”
That little bit of doubt is what secured Johnson’s freedom, but I doubt it ever will be enough to help him recover all he has lost, or free him from a lifetime of injustice from those convinced that he’s guilty as hell, that the court erred, and that unofficial punishment and retribution are now justified.