A 31-year-old North Little Rock man accused of raping a woman while she was passed out after a night of partying was cleared of wrongdoing by a mostly female jury Thursday after a two-day trial.
Miguel Alejandro Cossio, who faced a potential life sentence on the rape count, told the 11 women and one man of the jury that he never took advantage of the then-22-year-old woman and that he would have never done anything to her against her will. Jurors deliberated less than two hours before acquitting the Chilean native.
Defense attorney Bobby Digby told jurors he couldn't explain with any certainty why the woman had made up the allegations but suggested she might have done so because she was ashamed about her liaison with Cossio and another woman.
"They're trying to convict Miguel Cossio of rape because [the accuser] did not like the choices she made," Digby said in his closing arguments. "This is a common-sense case."
The other woman, 23-year-old Shauna Gabrielle Harrelson of North Little Rock, previously pleaded guilty to a reduced charge of second-degree sexual assault in an arrangement with prosecutors that required her to testify against Cossio.
Digby ridiculed Harrelson's story, pointing out that she gave police three versions of the July 2015 encounter. Prosecutors just chose the Harrelson story they liked, and Harrelson delivered that account to the jury, he said.
"[Prosecutors] want you to say she has pleaded guilty, so Miguel must be guilty," he said.
For Cossio to be guilty, Digby said, prosecutors had to prove that he had sex with the woman while she was unconscious and unable to resist. Just showing the woman was "super drunk" was not sufficient for jurors to conclude that she'd been raped like she said, he told jurors. There was little or no evidence that the woman was ever unconscious, he said.
"She told you she remembered things. She could have said no," he said. "If she's super drunk, it doesn't matter. It's all about unconsciousness."
Digby and prosecutor Jeanna Sherrill both claimed that the five dozen photos found on the woman's cellphone proved their side. Digby said the pictures showed the woman as an active participant while Sherrill said the woman's eyes are closed in all of them.
They show her head dangling and her slouched in unusual positions as Cossio and Harrelson abuse her while she's passed out, Sherrill told jurors.
The woman didn't even know photographs had been taken, the prosecutor said. She discovered them during a police interview.
"To think she's lying, you have to think she's deliberately posing as unconscious," Sherrill said. "She has no reason to stick around for three years to tell you what happened to her."
Cossio "fed" on the woman's vulnerabilities, the prosecutor said. He had befriended her a few weeks earlier at a time when "her world was crumbling." She had turned to alcohol to cope with the suicide of a close friend, and her resulting binge drinking had caused her husband to leave her and led friends to worry that she might kill herself, Sherrill told jurors.
"Even if she did all of that, she did not deserve all of this," the prosecutor said.
Sherrill urged jurors to recall the woman's testimony about suddenly awakening to find Cossio having sex with her. The woman's last memory before that instant had been sitting on her couch looking at her cellphone, the prosecutor said.
The woman immediately disengaged from Cossio and locked herself in the bathroom, first calling her husband and then a friend who told her to call police, which she did, Sherrill said. Police found her in the bathroom naked and hysterical, Sherrill said.
Cossio and Harrelson were in the apartment when officers arrived and later told detectives they had consensual sex with the woman while they had all been drinking together. The woman never complained or told them to stop, they said.
Metro on 08/04/2018