An inmate threatened his cellmate at Washington State Reformatory in Monroe and then twice forced him into sexual acts, a deputy prosecutor told a jury Tuesday in an unusual prison rape trial.
The man, now 20, was raped by Tremayne Francis, 34, who is serving a prison term for convictions of sexual assault on two men in Pierce County, according to the charges.
The trial is the first in recent memory in which an inmate has been prosecuted in Snohomish County for a sexual assault on another prisoner, deputy prosecutor Matt Baldock said.
He recently attended a national conference on the topic where even seasoned prosecutors said they had not prosecuted cases in which prisoners sexually assaulted other inmates.
The deputy prosecutor’s biggest chore in this trial, he said, will be getting the Superior Court jury to care about the alleged crime and the victim and witnesses involved.
There may be a tendency for jurors to think such attacks are a consequence of committing crimes and going to prison, Baldock said.
“I need to overcome that way of thinking,” Baldock said.
The case in Snohomish County is an outgrowth of the 2003 federal Prison Rape Elimination Act, which called for studying prison rape and gathering statistics on the issue, and provided some grant money.
The state Department of Corrections used some of the money to dedicate two investigators to the problem.
The investigators worked with the Monroe Police Department to gather the case against Francis.
On Tuesday, Baldock and public defender Donald Wackerman gave jurors a sense of the evidence they will see and hear over the next week or so.
While Baldock portrayed Francis as a threatening predator who told the victim he would “break you down and build you back up again,” Wackerman asked the jurors to look at the evidence carefully and to keep an open mind.
He alleged that the victim made up the rape story as a guise to get a transfer to a less secure prison.
“As a result of his claim, he got the minimum security placement he wanted,” Wackerman told jurors.
Reporter Jim Haley: 425-339-3447 or haley@heraldnet.com.
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