A Pulaski County jury deliberated less than an hour Thursday to reject a 7-year-old girl's claims she'd been raped by a 38-year-old Little Rock man who said the child's mother manipulated her into falsely accusing him.
Jonathan David Webb was charged with rape on Nov. 29, 2016, about two weeks after the girl, then 6, said he made her perform oral sex at his home.
Webb, a disabled Marine veteran with two daughters, and his attorneys, Leo Monterrey and Carol Hicks, told the eight-woman, four-man jury that the girl's 38-year-old mother put the girl up to making the accusations to get him out of their lives.
But the woman's testimony relied on too many coincidences and had too many conflicting elements to be believed, Monterrey said.
"This is a very smart woman," he said in his closing statement. "Why would she lie so much? She lied right to our faces."
To show jurors how easily the girl could be manipulated, Monterrey, on cross-examination, got her to testify about two other occasions she'd been with Webb, a birthday party and a beach trip, neither of which had taken place.
"Children are so vulnerable at that age," he said.
Character witnesses testifying on Webb's behalf included Bridget Afandi of North Little Rock, chaplain Leonard Higgins, Webb's brother Richard Webb of North Little Rock, and the Webbs' father, Don Webb of Porter, Texas.
Prosecutors Erin Driver and Katie Hinojosa described the defense arguments as a "smear campaign" on the girl's mother, a loving parent whose only motivation was to protect her child.
Driver urged jurors to focus on what the girl said, when she said it and how she said it, and not get distracted by what she called baseless attacks on the mother's character. "They just want to distract from her [the girl's] testimony," Driver said.
Their verdict should reflect who they believe is telling the truth, Webb or the girl, Driver told jurors.
Driver said Monterrey's questioning tactics might have tricked the girl on the witness stand, but the child's detailed description of what Webb did to her was too elaborate to be fake. To demonstrate the girl's knowledge, prosecutors had her draw Webb's genitalia for the jury.
"That level of detail can't be planted in a child's mind. She told you these things happened because they happened," Driver said.
Hinojosa asked jurors to consider the circumstances that led to the girl's claims even reaching police. A schoolyard conversation between the girl and a classmate led to a teacher calling authorities.
"It came up by accident ... when she said something to a little boy at school," she said.
If the girl's mother was so scheming as to use her daughter to frame Webb, surely the woman would have arranged a better opportunity for the girl to tell police, Hinojosa said.
Metro on 03/10/2018