Wait, what? Daughter recants rape claim; father freed after 9 years in prison
125 replies, posted
[release][quote][h2]Rape lie recanted after WA man spends 9 years in prison[/h2]
[url=http://www.king5.com/news/local/Rape-lie-recanted-after-man-spends-9-years-in-prison-145775175.html][b]//Source[/b] King5[/url]
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[img]http://media.king5.com/images/jail-bars-generic-prison.jpg[/img]
LONGVIEW, Wash. -- The Cowlitz County prosecutor says she won't charge a Longview woman who admitted she lied when she said her father raped her -- sending him to prison for more than nine years.
Prosecutor Sue Baur says charging Cassandra Kennedy might discourage girls from reporting sexual assaults.
Now 23 years old, Cassandra Kennedy says guilt prompted her to tell police in January that she lied as an 11-year-old in 2001 in Kalama.
[url=http://tdn.com/news/local/local-girl-lied-about-rape-father-set-free/article_bf9cac36-7c7a-11e1-a9e4-001a4bcf887a.html]The Daily News[/url] reports her father, Thomas Edward Kennedy, denied the allegation but was convicted by a jury and sentenced in 2002 to more than 15 years in prison.
Now 43, Thomas Kennedy was released last week and all charges against him were dismissed.
Cassandra Kennedy says she lied because she was disappointed in her father after her parents divorced.[/quote]
[quote][h2]Local girl lied about 2001 rape; father set free[/h2]
[url=http://tdn.com/news/local/local-girl-lied-about-rape-father-set-free/article_bf9cac36-7c7a-11e1-a9e4-001a4bcf887a.html][b]//Source[/b] The Daily News[/url]
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In early 2001, an 11-year-old Kalama girl named Cassandra Ann Kennedy told police her dad raped her on at least three occasions. Her father, Thomas Edward Kennedy, denied the allegation, but he was convicted by a jury and sentenced to more than 15 years in prison.
In January, Cassandra Kennedy, now 23, told Longview police she made it all up. So after serving more than nine years in prison, her father was released last week and the charges against him were dismissed.
"I did a horrible thing," Cassandra told detectives in January, according to a police report. "It's not OK to sit and be locked in this horrible place for something you didn't do. It's just not right."
Cowlitz County Prosecutor Sue Baur said Friday she's never seen a case quite like it. The innocent are sometimes freed after years in prison by the work of pro-bono legal teams and new DNA evidence. But Baur said she's never known a child to return to authorities a decade later and recant, certainly not with enough credibility to scuttle a case.
"This is something my whole office is talking about," she said. "This is the kind of thing that shouldn't happen."
Reached Friday, Thomas Kennedy, now 43, declined to comment, saying he's simply trying to get on with his life. Longview police, who investigated both the initial allegations in 2001 and the details that later exonerated Kennedy, also declined to comment and referred questions to Baur.
In recent months, Cassandra Kennedy has been staying at Mountain Ministries, a Christian addiction treatment center near Kelso, according to police reports. Gary Miller, the organization's director, said Thursday evening that she is in Mexico doing missionary work and can't be reached.
Baur said Cassandra Kennedy will not be prosecuted for her apparent lies about her father, partly because prosecutors do not want to discourage people in similar circumstances from coming forward.
[b]'I needed to do what was right'[/b]
Cassandra Kennedy called Longview police on Jan. 23, saying she wanted to talk about her father's 2002 conviction, according to investigative reports. She sat down with a pair of detectives at the department three days later.
"I need to do what is right," she told them, according to a report.
No, Cassandra told police, her father never touched her. For nearly a decade, she said, her father had been sitting in prison based on her lies.
"I just want him to be out and freed," Cassandra said in her interview with the police. Then, she said, "I will be free on the inside."
Cassandra said she got the idea of setting up her father from a friend whose stepfather was sent to prison for a child sex crime. "I thought that is what I would do to make my dad go away," she told police in January.
In her recent interviews with police, Cassandra recalled testifying against her father during his trial and "having to point at him and look at him and say who he was — and how bad I felt, all the guilt, thinking, 'Can I take it all back?' "
"I remember being so unhappy and scared that they were going to convict him," Cassandra told the detectives in January.
Police reports tell the story of an angry little girl who felt neglected by her father and, by her own admission, took "vengeance" on him.
Thomas Kennedy and his wife divorced around 1991, and their daughters, Cassandra and her older sister, began spending one weekend a month with their father, according to court documents. The girls slept on foam mattresses in the living room of Kennedy's Longview home.
[b]'I took vengeance'[/b]
As a child, Cassandra Kennedy liked Rollerblades, camping and swimming — typical kid stuff. But she told police her fellow Kalama Elementary students made fun of her clothes and her "buck teeth." She began experimenting with alcohol, she said.
The girl wrote in her journal, a copy of which is part of the court record, that her teacher "isn't nice and she never calls on me and she gives me mean looks." In 2000, a few months before she accused her father of incest, Cassandra was expelled from school for saying in a letter to her teacher that she was thinking about bringing a gun to school and shooting "everyone," according to a medical report. Cassandra had a couple of sessions with a counselor following the incident.
She attended Kalama High School until her junior year, when she dropped out, according to investigative reports. Cassandra said she became addicted to pills in her late teens and worked a few odd jobs, for just a month or two, at McDonald's and PetCo. By 2010, she was using meth and had felony convictions for burglary and theft, the reports said.
In January, Cassandra told police she still has fond childhood memories of sitting on her father's lap as he drove his pickup to collect wood pallets and wire to scrap.
"I was daddy's girl," she said. "I was with my dad!" But, she said, her father wasn't around much when she was little and that he drank heavily, smoked pot and partied.
"I wanted him to love me, and I didn't think he did at that time," she told the detectives.
So, Cassandra said, she made up the rape story, largely because her father disappointed her. "He wasn't showing up. I wanted him away so he would stop hurting me," she said this year. "I took my own vengeance."
In a 2001 interview with police, Cassandra said she wanted her father to take a lie detector test. When an investigator asked her what questions her dad should be asked, none of her suggested queries involved sexual abuse. Instead she wanted police to ask Kennedy: "Do you still smoke pot? Do you like to your kids? Do you still drink?"
Kennedy never took a lie detector test on the advice of his attorney, according to investigative documents.
Cassandra said this year that, as a child, she didn't understand the consequences of her lies. She told police she hadn't thought Kennedy would go to prison if he was convicted. "I just thought he would go away, you know, go to jail for a little bit, be out of my life," she said.
Baur, who was the prosecutor during the case, recalled Friday that all of the pieces in the investigation seemed to fall into place.
"It just totally made sense," she said.
Most startling, Baur said, was that Cassandra told the story of the abuse again and again with amazing consistency. Yet, Baur said, "she did not appear to me to be the most precocious 11-year-old."
[b]'Peace' a code word for abuse[/b]
Cassandra first told her teacher about the alleged incest in early 2001, according to reports. Teacher and student worked out a code word to signal that the abuse was continuing — "peace." Cassandra told police it wasn't long before she called the teacher: "It happened again," she said. "Peace."
Cassandra also wrote about the alleged abuse in a journal that included among its pink and purple pages other mundane entries about boys, Cassandra's slipping grades and her older sister's annoying behavior. On the cover, written in a little girl's haphazard letters, were the words "Confidential. No taking peeks."
Later in 2001, in an interview with Longview police investigators, Cassandra used stuffed animals to illustrate what her father had allegedly done to her, reports said. She also drew a picture of a bathroom where she said one of the rapes happened. Police later measured and photographed the room.
Cassandra's account included frightening detail, according to police reports. But if it wasn't true, police wanted to know this year, how could an 11-year-old know so much about sex? Cassandra told police in January that she began engaging in sexual activity as a second-grader. She also said she may have known what to tell police from watching a movie or from walking in on adults having sex.
In March of 2001, Cassandra was examined at a Vancouver clinic where she told a doctor about the alleged abuse. "She looked at me and said, 'Are you telling the truth?" Cassandra said this year of her appointment with the doctor. "I lied to her and said, 'Yes.' "
The doctor found trauma in Cassandra's groin area, according to a report.
Police described Cassandra's allegations during an interview with Kennedy in March of 2001. Kennedy, who was at the time a laborer and equipment operator at Metro Metals Northwest in Kelso, "denied doing anything," a Longview investigator wrote in a report. "He was very upset. He told me he would do anything to prove he didn't do anything."
A jury convicted Kennedy of three counts of first-degree rape of a child in 2002, and now-retired Cowlitz Superior Court Judge Jim Warme sentenced him to more than 15 years in prison.
Until then, Kennedy's criminal record had included convictions in the 1990s for fourth-degree assault, reckless driving and driving with a suspended license.
Cassandra's family members recalled to police this year that, during a 2002 trip to the beach, Cassandra told her mother she'd lied about the rape allegations, according to reports. However, Cassandra took back the statement a day later and insisted she'd been telling the truth all along, family members told police.
Kennedy, who was serving his sentence at the Stafford Creek Corrections Center in Aberdeen, appealed his conviction, alleging his defense attorney had been incompetent, but the appeals failed. Kennedy wasn't scheduled to be released until 2016.
On Feb. 15, after Longview police told prosecutors that Cassandra Kennedy was recanting, Baur wrote an urgent letter to Superior Court Judge Stephen Warning. "I need to inform you that I have been made aware of new, credible material evidence that potentially creates a reasonable likelihood that Mr. Kennedy is innocent of those crimes," Baur wrote, adding that her staff was "continuing to work with investigators to uncover the truth."
Kennedy was brought from Stafford Creek to the Cowlitz County Jail in late February, Baur said. During a hearing last Monday, Judge Warning ruled that Cassandra's statements to police this year are credible. He also found that the physical trauma reported by a doctor in 2001 may have been caused by a sexual experience that took place before the dates of the alleged abuse, Baur said.
Asked if there had been missteps in the initial investigation, Baur said she has recently reviewed a recording of the little girl's testimony and has been rethinking every detail of the case. She noted that 12 jurors found enough evidence at the time to convict Kennedy and that the conduct of prosecutors, defense attorneys and Judge Warme was upheld by the appeals court.
"There should be no indictment of the system," she said.
Instead, Baur said, it's simply a case of a victim withdrawing her story.
"Unfortunately, a man spent 10 years in prison before that happened," she said.[/quote][/release]
There are no words...
IMHO, it's a good thing she finally came clean here, but as a father, I don't know if I could forgive my daughter after doing something like that... I mean, [b]WHAT THE FUCKING FUCK, MAN.[/b]
She came clean for her own conscious not because she cares about her dad.
daddy is not paying enough attention to me
i'll tell the police he raped me 3 times
There needs to be more enforcement against this shit. Too many innocent people get wrecked over false accusations.
[QUOTE=Trogdon;35419105]She came clean for her own conscious not because she cares about her dad.[/QUOTE]
Damn straight. She said it herself;
[quote][i](...) "I just want him to be out and freed," Cassandra said in her interview with the police. Then, she said, [B][U]"I will be free on the inside."[/U][/B][/i][/quote]
[QUOTE=danielplazzy;35419120]There needs to be more enforcement against this shit. Too many innocent people get wrecked over false accusations.[/QUOTE]
I'm sure this is smaller than the actual rape cases.
She should go to prison for twice that amount of time, how does shit like this go unpunished? (forgive me for not reading the whole thing but what she did was a crime, even if she was a minor back then she should get some form of punishment for sending an innocent man to prison)
[QUOTE=]Prosecutor Sue Baur says charging Cassandra Kennedy might discourage girls from reporting sexual assaults.[/QUOTE]
This is rage inducing.
10 years in prison. Holy shit.
[QUOTE=danielplazzy;35419120]There needs to be more enforcement against this shit. Too many innocent people get wrecked over false accusations.[/QUOTE]
Well, she fooled detectives, teachers, doctors, a judge and a jury pretty simply... [B]she was sexually active already.[/B] All she did is re-tell her sexual experiences, but point to her dad.
[quote][i]Cassandra's account included frightening detail, according to police reports. But if it wasn't true, police wanted to know this year, how could an 11-year-old know so much about sex? Cassandra told police in January that she began engaging in sexual activity as a second-grader. She also said she may have known what to tell police from watching a movie or from walking in on adults having sex.[/i][/quote]
Besides... most grown-ups never think a kid would make up such a thing (why would they lie like that??), so they all bought her act hook, line and sinker.
Glad to see the justice system is working properly. Jurys are awesome!
She should get some form of punishment for this. She stole 9 years of his life, and we all know how child molesters get treated in prison.
I hope she experiences something similar and then regrets crying wolf when no-one believes her.
[QUOTE=DeanWinchester;35419198]She should go to prison for twice that amount of time, how does shit like this go unpunished? (forgive me for not reading the whole thing but what she did was a crime, even if she was a minor back then she should get some form of punishment for sending an innocent man to prison)[/QUOTE]
Playing the devils advocate here. If she thought she would get punished for telling the truth maybe she wouldn't have told at all and her dad would have served the entire sentence.
Not saying that she shouldn't be punished because it makes me angry as well, just saying that that is one line of thought and I understand it.
[QUOTE=soad_jonas;35419246]She should get some form of punishment for this. She stole 9 years of his life, and we all know how child molesters get treated in prison.[/QUOTE]
Absolutely. I imagine those 9 years were a living hell for her father...
It really makes you feel bad about him.
Wow, what a little cunt. Hope that asshole enjoys never having a relationship with her father again.
I don't think you can charge somebody for what they did when they were 11.
[QUOTE]Prosecutor Sue Baur says charging Cassandra Kennedy might discourage girls from reporting sexual assaults.[/QUOTE]
On the other hand, letting her go unpunished shows people just how easy it is to get away with false accusations.
This is a pretty disgusting twist of justice.
Also I really can't help but think that there would be a bunch of facepunchers calling for the death penalty for the father if this event happened 9 years later.
[QUOTE=Maloof?;35419270]I don't think you can charge somebody for what they did when they were 11.[/QUOTE]
She's been keeping it a secret and been lying for 9 years so obviously she should get some form of punishment.
[QUOTE=Jetblack357;35419265]Wow, what a little cunt. Hope that asshole enjoys never having a relationship with her father again.[/QUOTE]
Yup... I can see her father not speaking to her ever again.
[editline]3rd April 2012[/editline]
[QUOTE=Boxbot219;35419323]I really can't help but think that there would be a bunch of facepunchers calling for the death penalty for the father if this event happened 9 years later.[/QUOTE]
I guess now we shouldn't just jump to conclusions... :/
He should shoot her in the head and just walk back into prison.
[QUOTE=nivek;35419388]He should shoot her in the head and just walk back into prison.[/QUOTE]While I wouldn't blame him for being angry and even wanting some form of reprisal, that may be a little (very) extreme and unnecessary.
I don't think she should be punished since she came clean and it was something she did when she was 11.
I do however think her dad should get some sort of compensation for what he's been through.
I'm more pissed off that they actually convicted him. Since she lied, there would be nothing but circumstantial evidence to convict. No semen, no recordings, no graphic diary entries. She had vaginal trauma, so her father had to have done it. Great job, justice system.
[QUOTE=Boxbot219;35419323]This is a pretty disgusting twist of justice.
Also I really can't help but think that there would be a bunch of facepunchers calling for the death penalty for the father if this event happened 9 years later.[/QUOTE]
These days "DEATH PENALTY" is more of a running gag than anything else
I also wonder how good of a job the investigators behind the claim did, sometimes it seems they just assume the accused persons are guilty, and there have been cases where they pressure children in investigations where they later admit they have no memory of ever being molested.
[QUOTE=Ybbats;35419529]I also wonder how good of a job the investigators behind the claim did, sometimes it seems they just assume the accused persons are guilty, and there have been cases where they pressure children in investigations where they later admit they have no memory of ever being molested.[/QUOTE]
The way I see it, I'm sure she gave a pretty vivid description of "what happened" (thanks to her previous sexual experiences), and that was more than enough for the jury, I guess...
But I agree, the investigators did a terrible job.
The worst part of it is imagine how the father feels about all of this, the fact his own daughter lied about this for nine years. That's nine years he's lost and he's had to spend it with people believing he abused his own daughter which most likely led to a very uncomfortable prison life.
[QUOTE=Doctor Zedacon;35419407]While I wouldn't blame him for being angry and even wanting some form of reprisal, that may be a little (very) extreme and unnecessary.[/QUOTE]
I wouldn't find it surprising if he snaps and does kill her, nor will I have any sympathy towards her if he does. She stole 9 years of his life because she's an absolute bitch, and the fact that she's not being punished for it makes it even worse (probably twice as worse for him).
[editline]3rd April 2012[/editline]
Not saying she should die, I just wouldn't give a shit if she did.
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