A 40-year-old Little Rock man, already acquitted of one woman's accusations of kidnapping and rape, saw prosecutors drop a second rape count involving a second woman this week.
A Pulaski County jury previously rejected the second woman's claims that she had been abducted and raped by Korey Kuman Brown.
But the seven men and five women had not been able to reach the required unanimous verdict on whether Brown was guilty of rape, which allowed prosecutors to try him again on the charge. They deliberated for six hours at his second trial in May.
The decision to withdraw the second rape count ends 32 months of prosecution efforts to convict Brown over accusations that he abducted two women in downtown Little Rock and sexually assaulted them barely a month apart in the winter of 2014. He could have been sentenced to life in prison.
Brown, an admitted drug addict who was homeless at the time, testified at both trials.
He told jurors that the women, whom he'd never seen before, each approached him looking to smoke crack cocaine and have a good time, which ended up including consensual sex.
The women put up the money to buy drugs, and he used his connections in downtown Little Rock to get them, he testified. Each woman also let him drive her car because that was easier than him having to direct them where to go to find his dealers, Brown said.
He also acknowledged roughing up each woman during their time together. But he said he hit one of them by accident and struck the other woman over a misunderstanding about a crack pipe.
His testimony was remarkably similar at both trials, which were about eight months apart, as he described for jurors where he and the women went, what they talked about and the efforts he went through to get crack and something to smoke it with.
He was convicted of misdemeanor theft at his first trial and felony theft at his second for the only crimes he admitted to: stealing the first woman's credit card and the second woman's car.
He was sentenced to a year in jail in September 2015 for the misdemeanor count, but he had enough jail credit by then to immediately satisfy the sentence.
The second jury sentenced him to 17 years in prison, a punishment that makes him eligible for parole on Halloween 2018. As a habitual offender with four prior felony convictions, he faced a maximum of 30 years. He is appealing the verdict.
Brown was scheduled to stand trial on the last rape charge this week, although defense attorneys Leslie Borgognoni and Lou Marczuk were disputing the legality of a retrial.
They argued that since jurors had acquitted him of a kidnapping charge that required prosecutors to prove Brown had been motivated by criminal sexual purposes, he should also be considered to have been acquitted of the rape count.
But on Monday, the day before Brown was scheduled for trial, deputy prosecutor Jayme Butts-Hall dropped that charge.
She told Circuit Judge Leon Johnson that the second accuser, after twice testifying against Brown, did not want to go through a third trial. The woman has already given a lot of her time and energy to the case, much more than is usually required, Butts-Hall said.
The woman has actually testified three times in the course of the proceedings. Twice she appeared before juries, but she told her story under oath the first time at a February 2015 hearing for the judge to determine whether her testimony would be allowed at the other woman's trial.
The judge had to decide whether her story was similar enough to the other accuser's statement for prosecutors to use as evidence.
The defense disputed that what she had to say met the legal standard of evidence. They argued against allowing her to be a witness at Brown's first trial on the grounds that her testimony did more to make Brown look bad than it did to prove the other woman was telling the truth.
At trial in May, Brown's lawyers argued that the woman, a 24-year-old cocktail waitress, was making up the accusations because she had to explain how she lost her car in January 2014.
They told jurors the woman was embarrassed about having associated with Brown and was humiliated and angry about how he had left her half-naked on the side of the road when he stole her car.
A passer-by who found her crying, begging for help and wearing only a sheer top, took her to the hospital, where police were alerted.
Brown did not become a suspect until after the other woman, a 47-year-old bookkeeper, came forward and told police she had been abducted and raped by a man who got into her car in the parking garage behind the Arkansas Repertory Theatre on Main Street.
She said she'd pulled over after leaving Midtown Billiards in February 2014 to read and respond to a text message.
Brown had taken over her car, forced her to withdraw money from an ATM, took her to buy drugs, forced her to smoke crack and driven her to a field somewhere and raped her, the woman said.
Police recognized Brown by a bank surveillance photograph, and the woman was able to pick his picture out of a police lineup.
He was arrested in March 2014, then charged based on the younger woman's accusations after investigators got a DNA match.
Jurors acquitted him in 90 minutes after defense attorneys argued that the woman had plenty of opportunities to get away and also passed up chances to call for help.
They also questioned the plausibility of her description of how easily Brown bought drugs in downtown Little Rock.
NW News on 11/11/2016