A former Contra Costa County prosecutor who accused a senior colleague of raping her with a gun and an ice pick took the witness stand in open court for the first time Wednesday.
The appearance of Jane Doe, as she was identified in the Martinez courtroom, came three years after Deputy District Attorney Michael Gressett’s arrest, and one year after the woman failed to show up for an arbitration hearing on Gressett’s firing.
The arbitrator reinstated Gressett, who worked in the district attorney’s sex crimes unit, saying the prosecutor’s firing appeared to have been politically motivated.
The criminal case against Gressett is still alive, however, and on Wednesday the defense asked a judge to throw out the October 2009 grand jury indictment that sent it to trial.
Defense attorneys said the grand jurors should have been told that Gressett’s accuser had been in the process of securing a $450,000 civil settlement from the county – a deal that the Board of Supervisors ratified the day she testified before the grand jury.
The state attorney general’s office, which is handling the case, says it had no idea at the time that the woman had brought a civil claim.
The 32-year-old woman, who now lives in Florida, testified Wednesday that she hadn’t told the grand jury about the claim “because I wasn’t supposed to,” a reference to a confidentiality agreement she made during settlement talks.
The woman’s former bosses, including then-District Attorney Robert Kochly, have told Superior Court Judge Thomas Hastings that they had decided not to alert state prosecutors to the claim.
Gressett, 54, faces 13 criminal counts in connection with an alleged attack at his Martinez home while he and the woman were on a lunch break on May 8, 2008.
http://liarcatchers.com/civil_investigations.html
The woman said she had wanted to sleep with Gressett but objected to the type of sex he initiated. He pressed on, she said, sodomizing her, holding a gun to her head, handcuffing her and jamming ice into her.
Gressett told police the sex was kinky but that the woman had consented.
The woman did not immediately go to police but contacted a private attorney, who got in touch with Deputy District Attorney Paul Sequeira, who was third in command at the office. She told him she only wanted Gressett fired.
Sequeira alerted Kochly, but they never questioned Gressett, who continued to try cases. The office did not report the incident to Martinez police until September 2008.
On Wednesday, Gressett’s accuser said the county’s handling of the case was “at least inappropriate, and frankly egregious.”
Appearing confident and composed, she testified for an hour. The defense’s motion to throw out the indictment will continue to be heard Sept. 16.
Wednesday’s hearing was an extension of the defense’s bid to show that the case has been muddied by backroom deals and politics.
The arbitrator who gave Gressett his job back said the prosecutor’s bosses had retaliated against him because he ran three times for district attorney and supported an underdog candidate, Mark Peterson, in last year’s campaign.
Kochly and Sequeira supported a former prosecutor and judge, Dan O’Malley, who eventually lost to Peterson. They have denied being motivated by politics.
The case remains thorny. Gressett’s private investigator, Mark Harrison, went to Martinez on Aug. 17 to serve a subpoena on Sequeira, who was working one of his last shifts before starting a similar job in Mendocino County. The two men scuffled, prompting a police investigation.
