LITTLE ROCK — Prosecutors can use more than 100 sexually explicit images found on the home computer of a 31-year-old Sherwood man as evidence at his rape trial next month, a Pulaski County circuit judge ruled Monday.
Johnathan Johnston, 31, is charged with three counts of rape, accused of repeatedly abusing a 9-year-old girl beginning in December 2006 when she was 5 years old. Sherwood detective Frank Spence testified Monday that the girl told her mother Sept. 7 that Johnston had been molesting her for years and said Johnston had raped her the day before.
Police obtained a search warrant for Johnston’s home that same day, the detective told Circuit Judge Herb Wright. Among the items collected, Spence said, was a laptop computer, girl’s underwear and a shirt, he told Wright.
Sheriff’s investigator Chris Cone, a member of the Arkansas Internet Crimes Against Children Task Force, testified that he examined the computer for Sherwood police and located a cache of images that had come from the machine’s Internet browser.
Many of the pictures were of men with women who appeared significantly younger, Cone testified, but more significant was that all of them apparently had come from websites dedicated to incest.
He named at least 19 such sites. The pictures were marked with the address of the websites, Cone told the judge.
Defense attorney Bill James challenged the legality of using images from the computer at trial, arguing there was no proof his client had ever visited any of those sites.
Under cross-examination, Cone testified that the pictures could have been copied onto Johnston’s computer and that he didn’t know whether any of the websites actually existed.
Wright concluded Mon- day’s 3 1/2-hour hearing by siding with deputy prosecutor Scott Duncan, who argued jurors should be allowed to see the pictures.
Duncan said the images were evidence of Johnston’s planning and his interest in young girls. Wright did strike two images, advertisements for an incest website, but allowed the remaining images.
Doctors who examined the girl found an intimate scratch during an examination the day she told her mother, testified Dr. Karen Farst from Arkansas Children’s Hospital.
A pediatrician and child abuse expert, Farst conducted her own examination two weeks later, she told the judge, finding evidence of more significant injury, a penetrating trauma.
Farst said she could not say that the injury was definitively caused by sexual abuse.
But, questioned by James, she said the injury could not be a birth defect, saying the wound was “very apparent” and “very clear.”
Arkansas, Pages 10 on 07/31/2012