Quinton Riley Jr. will go to the penitentiary as a convicted sex offender but not a rapist under the terms of a plea deal that ended his trial Wednesday before prosecutors had finished presenting evidence.
The trial marked the third time Riley had been charged with rape, but he was never convicted of the crime.
The 28-year-old Little Rock man accepted a 15-year sentence in exchange for prosecutors replacing the rape charge against him, a Class Y felony that carries a potential life sentence, with a Class B felony kidnapping charge for holding his 24-year-old accuser against her will "for the purposes of sexual intercourse," deputy prosecutor Amanda Fields said.
That charge carries a maximum 30 years for a defendant like Riley, who has at most three prior felonies, including convictions for drug and firearm possession.
He'll have to serve at least a fourth of his time -- three years and nine months -- before he can qualify for parole. A rape conviction would have required him to serve at least 70 percent of his sentence if he were not sentenced to life in prison.
The married father of a daughter will also be required to register as a sex offender.
As a condition of his agreement with prosecutors Wednesday, Riley also pleaded guilty to kidnapping in the second case in which he had been charged with rape.
A jury in December 2013 had acquitted him of the rape charge. The jury instead convicted him of kidnapping.
But Circuit Judge Herb Wright nullified the verdict after one of the jurors was found to have violated court rules by posting messages about the proceedings on Facebook, some of them put online while she was in the jury room.
As part of Wednesday's plea, Riley agreed to drop his appeal of some of the judge's rulings in that case.
He accepted a 15-year sentence on that kidnapping charge, which will run concurrently with his other sentence.
Riley, represented by defense attorney Bill James, pleaded guilty as prosecutors were preparing to call to the witness stand Shannell Veasley of North Little Rock. An acquaintance of Riley's, she introduced him to the woman who accused him of rape.
Prosecutors had planned to play recordings of phone calls between Veasley and Riley made while he was in jail.
The sides disputed the significance of those phone calls.
Prosecutors said Riley could be heard in the calls talking about trying to discourage the accuser from cooperating, either by pressuring her or bribing her.
James said the calls would show a man worried about a woman going to court and lying about him. The recordings probably would not endear Riley to jurors, he said, but they would not hear Riley admit to any wrongdoing with the woman.
Riley's first rape trial in September 2013 ended when a judge dismissed the charge for lack of evidence.
The charge was based on statements from a woman who said she was sexually assaulted by an unknown intruder who bound her with duct tape.
Riley's third accuser's story was so similar to the account of his second accuser that she was allowed to testify at the December 2013 trial.
In the second trial, the 21-year-old woman told jurors she agreed to accept a ride from a stranger, later identified as Riley, when he drove up next to her on Wright Avenue in May 2012 and asked her if she wanted to smoke marijuana with him.
She testified that she laughed at first when he asked her to take off her clothes during the drive, until he told her she was too young to die and she could see the outline of a gun in his pants.
The woman said she stripped and got in the back seat of the gray Dodge Charger at Riley's command so she could not see where they were going.
The car briefly stopped, and Riley duct-taped her eyes, arms and mouth before raping her repeatedly. She said he put her back in the car and drove some more.
When he stopped the car again, she said, he got her out of the car, put her over his shoulder and re-bound her, also taping her hands and feet, the woman testified. He put her in a shed, taped her some more, then left, the woman said.
She said she waited some time to be sure Riley had left before trying to pull free from the tape. Police found her when she showed up at a nearby home, naked with some tape still stuck to her.
She was able to direct police back to the shed at 3030½ Lincoln Ave. in North Little Rock, where police collected used duct tape and condoms.
That Lincoln Avenue address, the home of one of Riley's cousins, was also where Riley's third accuser said he took her in 2010. She testified on Tuesday.
She said she was 19 and had known Riley casually for some time, but she had only begun hanging out with him in July 2010 on a couple of occasions to smoke marijuana with him.
She said he raped her the third time they were together after driving her to the Lincoln Avenue house and asking to see her breasts. She said he had broken her cellphone and thrown it out of the car along the way.
After she again refused to expose herself, he pulled a gun out from under his car seat and told her to "take my clothes off like my life depends on it," she said.
He put her in the back seat of the vehicle and raped her twice, then apologized, she said.
"He said he was so sorry, that he had sisters and he wouldn't want this to happen to them," the woman said. "[He said] he knew it was wrong, but he was so attracted to me."
She also testified that he seemed to consider killing her, too.
"He said, 'I don't know if I should take you home. I don't know what to do with you,'" she told jurors, saying that he agreed to take her home only after she recorded a cellphone video -- never found by police -- saying that she had consensual sex with him.
In interviews with police two years apart, Riley told investigators both women willingly had sex with him after he promised to pay them.
He said the third accuser accepted $55 for sex and that the second woman was mad at him because he'd backed out on a promise to pay her, then left her "butterball naked" outside an empty house.
Prosecutors acknowledged to jurors from the beginning of the trial that North Little Rock police had wrongly decided against arresting Riley over the accusations of the 2010 accuser and closed the case as unfounded five years ago, without consulting prosecutors.
But jurors were not told the rape charge was filed in 2014 after prosecutors reviewed the case during the subsequent investigation of Riley over other rape allegations.
Metro on 08/13/2015