 NEW TRIAL, BY ERROR: Lyle Coultas will get a new trial in Yamhill County. |
Years before the Yamhill County prosecutor’s office failed to hand over a police report in the case of McMinnville’s butt slap heard ’round the world, the Oregon State Bar investigated that same office for a similar offense.
In 2003, the Oregon Bar’s Disciplinary Council launched a probe into one of District Attorney Bradley Berry’s then-chief prosecutors, Cal Tichenor, for failing to disclose evidence crucial to the defense of a 47-year-old Yamhill County man accused of molesting five teenage girls in 2000.
The defendant, Lyle Coultas, accused Berry in a bar complaint of knowingly overlooking Tichenor’s actions during Coultas’ 2001 trial.
The Bar eventually ruled in 2003 against sanctioning Tichenor for failing to turn over evidence in Coultas’ trial. Circuit Judge James Hargreaves cited the importance of that report in overturning Coultas’ conviction in June, although he wrote that it was Coultas’ attorney who should have secured a copy of the report.
Coultas has since been transferred from Snake River Correctional Institution to the Yamhill County Jail for his new trial in September.
More recently, on Aug. 15, Circuit Judge John L. Collins found that Berry’s office had failed to turn over a key police report in its prosecution of 13-year-old middle-schoolers Ryan Cornelison and Cory Mashburn for allegedly groping their female classmates.
Sexual harassment charges against the two boys, stemming from the Feb. 22 butt-slapping incident at Patton Middle School, were dropped Monday, though the prospect of the county facing a civil suit from the boys’ families remains. The case attracted nationwide attention, with many believing that Yamhill County prosecutors had turned adolescent hijinks into charges that could have labeled both boys as sex offenders for life.
What’s gotten much less attention is the belief by Coultas’ family that history is repeating itself with withheld reports.
“I think that Yamhill County has got a thing about people accused of sex crimes,” said Harry Coultas, Lyle’s father. “They’ll do anything to nail them.”
Sentenced to 45 years in prison, Lyle Coultas maintains his innocence against the charges made by his then-14-year-old daughter and her friends. The girls accused Coultas of sex abuse, mostly during a weekend slumber party at his house.
One crucial piece of the case against Coultas was a computer report on a file containing pornographic pictures that prosecutors claimed had been shown to friends of Coultas’ daughter.
An independent investigation, partially paid for by Coultas’ parents, found that the computer files could not have been accessed the night the girls claimed the abuses occurred. That information was already contained in a 190-page police report that was never handed over to Coultas’ defense.
Tichenor, who was elected as a Yamhill County judge shortly after prosecuting Coultas, continues to defend his actions.
“I thought that what I did was right,” Tichenor says.
According to Coultas’ 2002 complaint, Berry never returned calls and letters sent to his office by Coultas and his family regarding Tichenor’s conduct during the trial.
“I do recall Coultas writing to me,” Berry says. “But since his case was on appeal, it was unethical to respond.”
.nar.jpg)
Contrary to the law, all the girls were interviewed simultaneously. Procedurally you are supposed to interview one at a time to spot inconsistencies. It also prevents the tale growing and growing as the girls build off each others stories.
I'd also like to add that only one girl accused my father to start, then they were all locked up in the Juliet House, and were questioned until they told them what they wanted to hear.
As for the character of these girls. They were aloud on my pc, and I'd barely left them alone and they were on schoolgossip.com all giggly as they talked about sex. They were on a forum talking about very adult things. After that, they weren't permitted on the computer, and it was pretty much my throne the rest of the weekend, because I tried to stay awake longer then the girls. Didn't work out that way, though. They outlasted me. And the reason I tried to stay awake is because they put make-up on me while I slept. I don't have a door on my room, so there wasn't much to stop them. I still have my bedspread, and it still bears a bright orange stain from those pranks.
Also, the DA implied that the 'Egor' file contained pornography, but the 120 page report proved that to be false. The girls were told NOT to mess with the Egor file because inside it was a program that shut down all our security and opened up the computer to use from other locations. A friend of ours, a programmer that used to work from Microsoft, did maintenance on my computer from his house because of this program. Now, we didn't want people aimlessly surfing the net when anyone could access the computer.
Anyway, here's a situation when the girls agreed that my father told them not to mess with that file, and the DA said that it must have contained pornography, and the little girls just said what the adults wanted to hear.
One final thing, in closing. My half-sister accused my father, on the stand, of being a drunkard. I lived with him, and I know for a fact that as long as I've lived he's never drank alcohol. As a younger man, he tried it once, and vomited, and it just wasn't for him. And yet my half-sister, who visited every second weekend, said he was a drunkard?
This kids did this sex abuse over a period of time and over continued protests from the girls.
Now, I got that hard drive used, so the pictures from said hard drive were present before the drive was reformatted and put to my use. Keep in mind, that forensic science can recover seven layers or information from a hard drive. The seven most recent layers that the memory had been. In this manner they were able to find only two pictures from time before the girls ever came around.
The rest off the pornography, from disks, was never accessed on my computer. Suspicious? Well, take into account that all these pictures were of cartoon girls in the style of anime, and that my half-sister was at the time a student of an art school, and her favorite subject matter to draw were girls in the anime style. I even still have some of her drawings from that time frame. And yes, my half-sister brought many transparent colorful disks over from her mothers house that were never accessed on my computer, but that were confiscated by police.
What you have here now is a PC that had two nude pictures on it, ever, and these from the distant past long before the girls came around, yet almost all of them claimed to have seen those pictures. How's that?
So the 120 page report showed two pictures from the distant past, a bunch of pictures from disks that were found to have never been present on my hard drive, and loads of cookies from dating websites, but nothing at all illegal.
Cookies, for those not so tech h-savvie, are bits of information stored on your computer from websites you surf to, and they speed up your loading time next time you go to that site or encounter that item again. Banner ads are generally saved as cookies, or at least were at the time. Banner ads have gotten more complicated in recent years, and I haven't kept up with that stuff. But at the time that's the way out cookies worked. It wasn't just banner ads, but that's what was used against me father.
Tichenor contended that the two pictures of Britney Spears, all the pictures of the cartoon girls from the disks, and the banner ads ALL were on the computer and shown to the girls.
Banner ads? Whose going to go to a temporary internet folder and start showing off cookies? And the other pictures weren't on the computer to she the girls.
Do you know what it's like to see a bunch of girls that dressed rather trashy before made up to look as young as possible for the Jury? Do you think the Juliet House stopped there? Nope. Do you know what it's like to watch someone from the Juliet House bring in teddy bears and blankets for the girls before the Jury arrives? I do! Before I saw it happen, I never would have thought it possible for the state to stoop that low. It was all an act, and the Jury bought into it.
I don't think most, if any of the girls, will wont to testify this time around, because now they are adults and can be charged with perjury, and when my father gets out, and he will get out, the suing will commence.
My half-sisters neighbor testified on my fathers behalf, she was a very sweet old lady that my father met only once and briefly. She said that shortly prior to these accusations coming up, my half-sister came to her house after a fight with her mother and step-father, and this old lady called my father, who came over. My half-sister ran to my father and begged him to take her home to live with he and I. What changed then?
The real villain in this story? In my opinion that would be the Juliet House. In the guise of counseling, they pushed and pushed these girls until they were saying what the adults wanted to hear.
It all began with one lie from one little girl, and my half-sisters mother ceased it, not caring that this same girl had falsely accused someone else of the same time in the past.
The accusation? That while she and Donna were in bed he came upstairs and laid down between them. What wasn't mentioned is that those stairs creaks enough to wake the dead, and the bed in question was a single-size. How is a 300 plus pound man going to lay down between two girls on such a small bed?
If they'd never sent all those girls to the Juliet House, if it had only been that one girl, the investigation would have gone nowhere. The police would have come to the house and went up the stairs, they would have heard how loud they creaked and they would have seen how small the bed was, and the only reasonable conclusion would have been that the story was impossible. Add to that the past allegations and her words lose their steam, eh?
Add to this the loads of evidence Mr. Stoller has accumulated, and I think there can only be one conclusion. He's innocent.
What's the world coming to when simply touching a girls lip is a sexual gesture? He did that, yes, but only because she was a klutz and face-planted into the arm of the sofa, and he was making sure it wasn't bleeding or anything. I was there, and it didn't look sexual to me. Just a grown-up making sure a girl was alright.