Dna Tests At Core Of Rape Evidence

From For the record (Friday, December 8, 1995): Larry Stapleton was convicted in July of second-degree robbery, his third serious offense. While he has not yet been sentenced, the courts have no choice but to send him to prison for life under the state’s Three Strikes, You’re Out law. A Thursday article reported he had already been sentenced.

The teenager says she’s had sexual intercourse twice in her life. Both were rapes that resulted in pregnancies, she says.

The girl gave the first baby - a boy born when she was 11 - up for adoption. No one was arrested for the alleged crime.

She kept the second child - a boy who’s now 2 years old - and will testify this week in the rape trial of the man DNA tests “practically proved” is the infant’s father.

Spokane County Superior Court Judge Tari Eitzen ruled Wednesday that those test results will be admitted as evidence.

Phillip C. Kramer, 50, maintains he never had sex with the girl, who was 14 at the time of the alleged rape and is now 17.

Last January, Kramer passed a lie-detector test given by an independent firm. But lie-detector tests, considered scientifically unreliable, aren’t allowed as evidence in Washington courts.

A jury, expected to be selected today, will decide whether Kramer is guilty of second-degree rape of a child, as charged.

Such a conviction would send Kramer to prison for life without possibility of parole under the state’s “Three Strikes, You’re Out” law.

Kramer’s criminal record includes convictions in 1974 for indecent liberties, in 1978 for second-degree rape and indecent liberties, in 1982 for third-degree statutory rape, and in 1983 for first-degree rape, second-degree rape and third-degree statutory rape.

In the current case, the girl gave this account, outlined in court documents:

Kramer, a longtime friend of the girl’s family, hired her to baby-sit his sister’s children one night in spring 1993. The job was at Kramer’s mother’s house in the East Central neighborhood.

Kramer was driving the girl home when she challenged him to a dart game and the pair drove to his north Spokane house. He gave her a soft drink she contends was mixed with rum.

The girl became dizzy from the drink, fell asleep at Kramer’s house and woke up at her own home. A few weeks later, she realized she was pregnant and confronted Kramer, who allegedly acknowledged they’d had sex.

The girl wore baggy clothes, hiding the pregnancy from her mother until she went into labor in January 1994.

Defense attorney Mary Schultz calls the story unbelievable and contends the girl - looking for someone to blame for the pregnancy - targeted Kramer because she knew about his past convictions.

Schultz won’t say whether Kramer hired the girl for baby-sitting or took her to his home. She has advised Kramer not to discuss the case.

“We don’t have a woman saying ‘I know he’s the dad because we had intercourse,”’ Schultz said during a pre-trial hearing Wednesday.

“What we have is an individual saying, ‘I don’t remember having intercourse with anyone, but I know he’s the dad because my period stopped two weeks later.’

“That’s not evidence. That’s … I don’t know what.”

But DNA tests are evidence, and Schultz’s chore will be to convince the jury to disregard a test that showed a 99.89 percent probability that Kramer is the baby’s father.

Geneticists at The Blood Center of Southeastern Wisconsin, which conducted the tests, gave this case its highest ranking: “practically proved.”

“It’s 912 times more likely that Mr. Kramer is the father of this child than that another random male in the (Spokane) population is the father of this child,” said Debra Endean, director of paternity testing at The Blood Center.

Schultz called experts to Spokane to refute Endean’s testimony and convince the judge that DNA evidence, which has been accepted as scientifically sound in Washington courts, is “voodooism.”

“What people don’t understand and what you don’t understand until you talk to the experts is that there are serious problems with this evidence,” Schultz said.

“What you’ve got are these rocket science arguments (supporting DNA testing) that are based on these assumptions that aren’t accurate.”

Even if all the assumptions are correct, Schultz claimed statistics show that any one of more than 2,000 Washington men could have fathered the child.

After 2-1/2 days of testimony, Judge Eitzen overruled Schultz’s objections, saying most geneticists accept the methods and assumptions used at the Wisconsin lab.

Noting that the O.J. Simpson jury was persuaded to disregard DNA evidence, Schultz said she’ll bring her experts back to testify during the trial. Endean also will testify.

The girl’s mother and stepmother said they don’t know whether she will file a civil lawsuit seeking child support after the criminal case is settled.

, DataTimes MEMO: This sidebar appeared with the story: Three have ‘Three Strikes’ Three men convicted in Spokane County courts are serving life sentences without the possibility of parole under Washington’s “Three Strikes, You’re Out” law. Voters passed the initiative by an overwhelming margin in 1993. Mandatory life sentences were given to: Harold Bingham, who escaped from a minimum-security prison camp in 1994 and was caught burglarizing a home a few weeks later. Bingham pleaded guilty to burglary in March. His previous convictions were for second-degree murder and robbery. Larry Stapleton, convicted of second-degree robbery in July, had two prior armed robbery convictions. Gary Quarles, who gunned down his girlfriend, was convicted of first-degree murder in November. His prior convictions included Pierce County robberies in 1988 and 1992.