XPost: neworleans.general, alt.abortion, sac.politics
XPost: alt.war.civil.usa

https://bloximages.newyork1.vip.townnews.com/theadvocate.com/content/tncms/assets/v3/editorial/5/c3/5c33054e-2f1c-11e9-9a72-971cf0d5654c/5c63541b068ae.image.jpg?resize=640%2C427
Sherman Hampton

She walked to the witness stand with a prosecutor’s hand guiding the way — a much older woman than the 29-year-old who reported a rape to police in June 1992.

Still, on Tuesday she said there were some things she could never forget: the red shirt and jean miniskirt she wore as she waited for a bus near the former St. Thomas housing development. The fear she felt when a man forced her into an abandoned building,
bound her hands with duct tape and assaulted her. And the voices of the young children playing outside who led her to safety.

“My life has been destroyed,” the woman said in a New Orleans courtroom. “I waited too long to go through this.”

The woman was one of four to tell police that they were raped in horrific encounters with a stranger who threatened their lives between 1992 and 2003.

Their cases went unsolved for years — and drew outright disbelief from police in one instance — until DNA matches linked all four of the cases. Arrest warrants for a man named Sherman Hampton were obtained in 2007 and 2008, and he was finally booked
into jail in 2013.

Hampton's long journey to trial was delayed in June 2014 after doctors testified that he was mentally incompetent. He was found competent to proceed in March 2015 and again at a hearing last week, court records show.

Almost 27 years after the first case listed in an indictment, Hampton went on trial this week in Criminal District Judge Robin Pittman's courtroom. The 64-year-old faces an automatic life sentence if he is convicted on any of the four first-degree rape
charges.

Assistant District Tiffany Tucker, the prosecutor who led the first accuser to the stand, told jurors that the case against Hampton is built upon solid DNA evidence.

The women from different parts of the city who never knew each other would now unite to accuse one man, she said.

The first woman who testified Tuesday dabbed her eyes with tissues as she recalled the attack. It has haunted her ever since, she said. She spent years abusing drugs and still sleeps in a different room from her husband.

In addition to the woman who said she was raped near the St. Thomas development, there was a second woman who said she was raped in the stairwell of a building in the 2100 block of Third Street in May 1995, a third woman who said she was raped in the
4200 block of Freret Street in April 2003, and a fourth woman who said she was raped in her home in the 2100 block of South Liberty Street in May 2003.

“This is the person who did it,” Tucker said as she gestured to Hampton. “We finally, finally are able to give the victims answers as to what happened to them all those years ago.”

Three months after the last attack, Hampton was arrested on an unrelated burglary charge. He pleaded guilty and received a 10-year sentence in 2004.

In his opening statement, defense attorney Greg Carter told the jury not to jump to conclusions despite the DNA evidence.

“I know TV, movies, popular culture — they all tell you that DNA evidence is infallible. ... That’s not correct. That’s not the truth,” he said. “The truth is that that man is innocent, and he did not commit these crimes.”

Carter said there are no independent witnesses who could describe the attacker. Aside from the DNA collected during sexual assault examinations, there also is no forensic evidence, he said.

One woman has elected not to testify at the trial, leaving his client unable to confront her account, Carter said. Prosecutors said they will call the woman to whom that victim first reported the crime, under an exception to Louisiana’s rule against
hearsay.

Carter also sought to poke holes in the accounts of the women who would testify, pointing out that one woman said her attacker was 5 feet 5 inches tall, while Hampton is 6 feet. Another woman said her back window was knocked out by the attacker, but
police found no signs of it being disturbed.

“DNA evidence is not infallible. They’re humans, they make mistakes like anyone else,” Carter said.

https://www.theadvocate.com/new_orleans/news/courts/accuser-faces-alleged-serial-rapist-in-orleans-parish-case-defined-by-dna-evidence/article_df31b410-2f1a-11e9-bef3-03fbc44f4d61.html

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