Maumelle High School's band director received the minimal prison sentence on Thursday -- five years -- for repeatedly molesting a teenage student over two years in what prosecutors called a typical case of pedophile grooming and a gross abuse of trust.
Charged with two counts of second-degree sexual assault, Carl Lyle Mouton was accused of regularly groping a girl's buttocks on school grounds from the time she was 14 until she left the school at age 16.
Authorities say his abuse peaked in July 2015 when he pulled down her shirt and nuzzled her breasts with his mouth, also at the school.
Mouton, who's been teaching music and band for more than 30 years, told jurors on Thursday there had never been any inappropriate contact between him and the girl, now 17, even by accident.
The school suspended him after his May 2016 arrest, and he has been on unpaid leave for a year.
The seven men and five women of the jury deliberated about an hour before finding Mouton guilty as charged.
The 58-year-old Sherwood father of three faced up to 40 years, 20 for each count. Mouton will also have to register as a sex offender. He can qualify for parole after serving 10 months.
Mouton testified for about 35 minutes, telling jurors that his accuser and another girl were smart and accomplished students.
The two girls had always been very affectionate towards him, like many students were, he said. He never had a reason to think anything was out of the ordinary with them, he added.
"They were pretty much consistent in their affections," he told jurors. "[The girl] was very affectionate towards me. She would sometimes ambush me with hugs."
Mouton said he'd been trained on fending off that kind of student affection or at least keeping physical contact with students to a minimum. He said he'd try to keep students from full-frontal contact, either by putting his arms in front of him or by turning the embrace into a side-hug.
On cross-examination, deputy prosecutor Jeanna Sherrill focused on Mouton's trial testimony that he had been told by the school principal in May 2016 which girls were involved in taking the allegations to the police.
But in his interview with police, Mouton only mentioned one girl by name and never used the victim's name, although he told officers that the girl had a friend who was likely the source of the accusations.
Prosecutors said that assessing Mouton's guilt from the testimony and evidence was a matter of common sense, considering that his accuser didn't come forward voluntarily. Only after a classmate disclosed what the girl had told her about Mouton did Maumelle police get involved, prosecutors said.
What motive would the girl and her friend have for lying about him? Sherrill asked jurors in closing arguments.
If the girl's accusations are lies, why aren't they better lies, given how smart and accomplished she is, rather than stories about him fondling her buttocks and putting his mouth on her breasts, Sherrill said.
"If she's going to make up something on Mr. Mouton, wouldn't she make up something better?" the prosecutor said.
Mouton took advantage of the girl's admiration and respect for him to molest her for years, Sherrill said. He knew the girl liked being the focus of his attention, the prosecutor said.
"She had a crush on him. She likes him. She has no reason to say it's going on, and she had every reason to allow it," Sherrill told jurors. "The defendant took advantage of the fact she liked him. He was her teacher ... and he sexually assaulted her."
If the girl's friend hadn't disclosed what the girl had told her, Mouton would have kept on molesting the girl, Sherrill said. And the girl would have let him keep doing it, the prosecutor said.
The girl testified Thursday that she never wanted anyone to know what had gone on between her and Mouton. She never went to police. Authorities came to her after a classmate disclosed what she had said about Mouton.
The girl said her first thought had been to worry about what would happen to Mouton, a "nice guy," and that she'd tried to protect him.
"I didn't really want it to come out," she said. "I was afraid how it would affect him."
But she was hurt when he refused to acknowledge what had gone on between them, saying she felt betrayed by how he called her a liar.
She told jurors she didn't know what the cost would be when she went up against a respected and popular teacher. She said the Maumelle High band and other students, ones she had considered friends, ostracized her and denounced her as a liar on Facebook, despite efforts to shield her identity from the public.
"What I didn't consider was how it affected me," she told jurors. "I felt like it was me against the world."
Her father also testified about how his daughter was treated by the Maumelle High students.
"They started to mock her relentlessly," the 46-year-old Conway man told jurors.
She was already embarrassed that her parents had learned what had happened, and the disclosure caused her to isolate herself from friends and family, he said. But the students' reaction made things worse for her, he told jurors.
"That caused her to withdraw more," he said. "She's been dealing with depression, and she's been dealing with isolation."
Defense attorney Jeff Rosenzweig told jurors to focus more on how the girls behaved rather than what they said. With testimony that the victim had told her friend at the beginning of the 2016 school year, both girls continued to be affectionate toward Mouton, regularly hugging him, sometimes individually and sometimes together, he said.
"What in their behavior supports one scintilla of this? Nothing. Not. One. Thing," he said in his final remarks. There's nothing in their behavior that would indicate anything was amiss.
"Give Carl Mouton his life back! Acquit him of these charges."
Prosecutors derided the defense suggestion that Mouton could be the victim of a smear campaign instigated by a band booster whom Mouton had forced out of the parents' program. That man, Leonard McKinney, a 53-year-old former Little Rock police officer, was never called to testify.
Deputy prosecutor Michelle Quiller told jurors that under the defense theory, McKinney would have had to cook up his plot to revenge himself on Mouton in just a couple of hours, then rely on two teenage girls to stick with his plan for more than a year, including having to testify at trial and in other hearings.
Deciding on a sentence took jurors about 33 minutes.
On a defense motion, Pulaski County Circuit Judge Herb Wright rejected an effort by prosecutors to call a former Mouton student who said he did the same things to her when she was 14 in 1999 and Mouton was the Oak Grove High School band director.
But when the judge said he might reconsider his ruling depending on what defense character witnesses said about Mouton, the defense opted not to call anyone to testify for him at sentencing.
Wright also declined a defense request to allow an inquiry into the victim's relationship with her classmate that Rosenzweig said could better explain to jurors why the victim could have fabricated the accusations against Mouton.
And the judge declined a defense request to override the jury's sentence and grant Mouton probation.
Jurors had the opportunity to recommend probation, he said, and he did not think it would be appropriate to disallow their sentencing verdict.
Metro on 06/02/2017