Child Rape Charges Dropped Against Woman Case That Was Hoped Would Test Polygraph Admissibility Thrown Out For Lack Of Evidence

The second of two first-degree child rape charges against a 51-year-old Wilbur, Wash., grandmother disintegrated in court Thursday and was dismissed.

The voluntary dismissal undercut a potentially precedent-setting ruling that lie detector tests could be presented as scientific evidence. The dismissal prevents an appellate court test that could overturn the traditional exclusion of lie detector results in court.

Visiting Superior Court Judge Richard Miller, from Adams County, granted Spokane defense attorney Mary Schultz’s motion to tell a jury next week that two lie-detector tests showed Peggy Jannot was truthful when she pleaded her innocence.

Schultz said she knows of no other case in which a judge has ruled polygraph results meet the court standard for being accepted. Miller agreed with Schultz that polygraphs are used extensively and considered reliable by police, prosecutors, counselors, corrections officers and employers.

He said a jury could attach whatever significance it wished to a lie detector test, just as it would with any other expert testimony.

Miller told Lincoln County Prosecutor Ron Shepherd it was “clear” that the case against Peggy Jannot was too weak to go to trial as scheduled Monday.

Jannot was accused of using her finger to rape two preschool girls at various times in 1994, when they were 4 and 5 years old. But Miller said the evidence was inconclusive at best, and could indicate exactly what Jannot said all along: that she wiped the children after they went to the bathroom.

Shepherd already had dismissed one of the child rape charges Monday. He promptly dropped the remaining charge Thursday after the second of two day-long hearings on motions about what evidence could be presented to a jury.

The prosecutor had little choice because of several rulings by Miller that left Shepherd with almost no evidence.

And the judge didn’t bother to rule on statistical evidence that it is unheard of for women older than 36 to become first-time sex offenders. Jannot has no criminal record and attends the same church as the farm family who accused her.

Shepherd conceded the purported rape wasn’t sexually motivated, but suggested Jannot may have wanted to “control” or punish the children.

Miller said the alleged victim, now 5, seemed to understand the importance of telling the truth when she testified Monday, but he found her too immature to testify before a jury.

“Despite all the coaxing, leading questions and breaks (recesses to regain her composure), and having a care-giver that she trusted right with her at the witness stand, even then she didn’t say anything other than Peggy touched her private parts,” Miller said. ” … You’d have to speculate to get from there to evidence that would be sufficient to convict the evidence.”

The judge also ruled that the girl’s mother and a Spokane social worker couldn’t testify about two instances of alleged rape they say the girl told them about. State law allows hearsay testimony on behalf of children too young to testify on their own. However, the children’s statements must have been spontaneous and supported by other evidence.

Miller said there was virtually no corroborating evidence. On the contrary, he said, the record was “replete” with evidence that the girl said she was abused only after repeated questioning in which her mother may inadvertently have planted the idea.

The mother, reacting to another mother’s claim of sexual abuse, “was trying to do what any mother would do,” Miller said.

Jannot wept, hugged her attorney and family members, and declined to comment when she left the courtroom.

“This was just a kind of hysteria that developed with really no basis,” Schultz said. “It’s tragic that these children had to be put through this with this kind of evidence, and it’s tragic that Peggy had to be put through this.”

, DataTimes