Grand Coulee bus driver’s conviction overturned

A 64-year-old former Grand Coulee, Wash., school bus driver convicted of having sex with a student had his conviction permanently overturned Tuesday.

The Washington Court of Appeals in Spokane said the only evidence that Dennis A. Clinkenbeard had intercourse with the student was improperly presented to an Okanogan County Superior Court jury in May 2004.

Evidence that Clinkenbeard began courting the girl when she was 12 years old wasn’t sufficient for his conviction on one count of first-degree sexual misconduct with a minor. Nor was eyewitness testimony that he kissed and fondled her publicly. The law required evidence of sex.

According to one of the student’s friends, the student told the friend she had sex with Clinkenbeard on several occasions in May 2003 – after she turned 18, but while she was still a senior at Lake Roosevelt High School in Grand Coulee.

It wouldn’t have mattered that the sex was consensual or that she was 18. All that mattered was that she was a student and Clinkenbeard was a Grand Coulee School District employee.

But the former student, now 20, testified that she didn’t have intercourse with Clinkenbeard, who divorced his wife and moved into a trailer next to the young woman’s home when she turned 18.

Okanogan County Prosecutor Karl Sloan was allowed to present testimony that the woman’s statements to Grand Coulee police contradicted her testimony at trial.

Police Sgt. Larry Hall and Officer Joseph Lauseng testified that while they were searching the woman’s bedroom for incriminating photos, gifts and letters, Hall asked her whether she wanted him to tell her mother that she and Clinkenbeard were having sex. They said her reply was that “news like this a mother should hear from her daughter.”

Such hearsay testimony would have been inadmissible if not to impeach the woman’s statements.

The woman testified that her statement to the officers wasn’t an admission of a sexual relationship but that it was an effort to block Hall’s line of questioning.

The Court of Appeals said Sloan improperly argued that the testimony proved Clinkenbeard’s guilt. The court said there was no legitimate testimony sufficient to prove Clinkenbeard had sex with a student.

Sloan was not available for comment on the appellate ruling.

The Court of Appeals rejected Clinkenbeard’s arguments that the law under which he was convicted should be overturned as an unconstitutional infringement of his right to have sex with any adult who consents. Clinkenbeard also argued unsuccessfully that he was denied equal protection because the law singles out school employees for a ban on sex with students.

Although the law applies primarily to sex with teenagers 16 to 17 years old, it includes high school students who have turned 18. Except with school employees, 18-year-old students would be free to have sex with other adults.

The state’s interest in protecting students from sexual exploitation trumps the general right of adults to have sex among themselves as they please, the Court of Appeals said. The reason for the law seems “especially cogent” in Clinkenbeard’s case, considering that he began “sexual overtures” with a 12-year-old girl who was 44 years his junior, the three-judge appellate panel said.

Another former district employee, Frank Dean Turner, 57, a custodian and bus driver, pleaded guilty in May to two counts of communication with a minor for immoral purposes. He was sentenced to a year in jail on each count with all but a month suspended.

Turner had been charged with three counts of first-degree child rape and five counts of first-degree child molestation involving two girls, who are now 19- and 22-year-old women.