A 27-year-old Little Rock man who said he was being framed for rape was sentenced to 15 years in prison Thursday by a Pulaski County jury that rejected claims that his accuser made up the accusations because she was mad that he had refused to pay her for consensual sex.
Christian Kevith Powell faced a potential life sentence on the Class Y felony rape charge during the two-day trial before Circuit Judge Herb Wright. He will have to serve 10½ years before he can qualify for parole.
The 36-year-old North Little Rock woman told jurors that Powell knocked at the door of her Division Street home on Sept. 26, pushed his way inside, then asked to use her bathroom. She told him no and ordered him to get out, she said. Instead, he pushed her into another room, punched her in the face when she resisted, forced her to the floor, pinned her down and raped her, she said.
"As he's leaving, he tells me if I call the police, he would come back and kill me," she told jurors, her voice quavering.
Prosecutor Kelly Ward told jurors that the woman called police so quickly that the DNA evidence that eventually linked Powell to the attack was still fresh.
"Everything fits with what she said," Ward told jurors. "Physical evidence, it can't lie, and it can't change."
Prosecutors scoffed at Powell's claim that he was being set up because of what the woman couldn't tell police, her assailant's name. Investigators got his name when the DNA evidence matched his genetic material in a crime database. He was on probation at the time for theft by receiving and aggravated assault.
The woman only knew him as a man she'd met at the downtown Little Rock bus station a few days before she was attacked. She'd rebuffed his advances then and refused to tell him more than her first name, the prosecutors said.
Powell told jurors that he'd been pursuing the woman for sex since they happened to meet at the bus station. He said she'd invited him to the house and had exchanged text messages about having sex. He testified that injuries to the woman's genitalia came from rough consensual sex, his preferred style of intercourse.
"Certain women ... it doesn't take much, like in this case, It wasn't no real relationship. She knew exactly what I was coming over there for," Powell told the eight women and four men of the jury. "Rough sex ... that's how I have sex. Period. That's how I choose to have sex."
Powell said the woman lied about being raped because she was mad that he refused to pay her when they were done.
On cross-examination by deputy prosecutor Sam Jackson, Powell admitted that he slapped the woman while leaving the house, a detail he'd left out of the story he'd told police.
Pressed by the prosecutor, Powell said that he hadn't been completely upfront with detective Lonnell Tims, even to the point of passing up an opportunity to offer evidence that he said could clear him.
"I didn't really tell him much of anything. I was really not trying to answer the questions at all," Powell said. "I was going to jail anyway. I had enough sense to know DNA was going to lock me up."
Defense attorney Brandy Turner said there was a big hole in the prosecution's case. How could Powell have found the woman's home if all he knew was her first name, Turner asked jurors. She also said the woman's injuries were too slight to support her claim that Powell had manhandled her and raped her on a hardwood floor.
Metro on 05/24/2019