Re: Illinois Police Sergeant to go on trial as serial rapist
- From: indigoace@xxxxxxx (Indigo Ace)
- Date: Mon, 12 May 2008 21:39:24 GMT
On Sun, 11 May 2008 14:01:14 -0400, "tiny dancer"
<tinydancer357@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Ex-Ill. sergeant accused of rape to go on trial
By DAVID MERCER, Associated Press Writer1 hour, 1 minute ago
Thanks, tiny! I'd lost track of this one. I dug up a couple of local
articles. The first one's from the Bloomington Illinois paper (the
Pantagraph), & the second is from the Peoria (IL) Journal Star--
Two jurors dismissed from Pelo trial in morning questioning
By Edith Brady-Lunny
eblunny @pantagraph.com
NEW 1 p.m. BLOOMINGTON ? Two of the first four potential jurors
questioned in the rape trial of former Bloomington police sergeant
Jeff Pelo were excused this morning ? one for having a solid opinion
about Pelo?s guilt or innocence and a second who is related to a
Bloomington police officer.
Two other jurors cleared the initial rounds of questioning by
associate Judge Robert Freitag, Chief Felony Prosecutor Mark Messman
and defense lawyer Michael Rosenblat. Freitag said the 12 jurors and
three alternates will be selected in panels of four.
Pelo, 43, smiled and nodded when he was introduced by Rosenblat to a
courtroom filled with 40 potential jurors.
Pelo?s three children were in the courtroom for the two-hour
questioning of four jury candidates, His wife, Rickielee Pelo, came to
the Law & Justice Center but is excluded from the courtroom along with
all of the other 116 potential witnesses. Several family members and
supporters of the alleged victims also were in court.
Pelo is accused of sexually assaulting four women between 2002 and
2005 and stalking a fifth woman between 2005 and 2006.
Jurors were asked a series of questions by the judge about their
employment, education and if they are related to law enforcement
officers. Messman followed with inquiries about the television shows
the potential jurors watched, specifically crime shows such as CSI.
Among the things the defense wanted to know were people?s views on
eyewitness identifications and the exposure people have had to news
reports on the Pelo case.
One of the women excused from jury service said she did not believe
she could ignore her opinions about the case.
"I think it would be hard for me to set that aside," said the woman,
who works at Illinois State University.
Jury selection continues this afternoon.
http://www.pantagraph.com/articles/2008/05/12/news/doc482888632eec6425563027.txt
Officer's rape trial confronts tough issue
Pelo accused of stalking four women in Bloomington
Sunday, May 11, 2008
BY MATT BUEDEL
OF THE JOURNAL STAR
BLOOMINGTON - Mayor Steve Stockton looks to the north when he
contemplates how outsiders perceive Bloomington as perhaps the highest
profile criminal trial the city has seen in recent memory approaches.
He thinks of Drew Peterson, the former sergeant with the Bolingbrook
Police Department suspected in his fourth wife's disappearance and
third wife's questionable death. Peterson, a cop, is unofficially
accused of violating his sworn duty to protect in the most heinous
manner.
Then Stockton looks back to his own city, which Monday will host a
trial against its own former sergeant, Jeff Pelo, for a series of
rapes over a span of four years. Pelo's arrest nearly two years ago
trained the same national spotlight on Bloomington that Peterson
brought more recently to Bolingbrook.
And Stockton asks himself: "I kind of wonder as we look at
Bolingbrook, is that how other people look at us, with curiosity?"
The details of Pelo's alleged crimes can't help but grab attention.
Pelo, a cop, now purportedly the inmate longest held in the McLean
County Jail while waiting trial, officially is accused in no uncertain
terms of unthinkable acts - and allegedly selecting his victims from
his desk at the police department.
Pelo's story, as told by county prosecutors and the city detectives,
his colleagues, who investigated him, is one of a double life. They
say by day he was a desk sergeant, a husband, a father; by night, a
stalker, a burglar, a rapist who forced his victims with guns and
knives and further intimidated them with personal knowledge of their
relatives.
But Stockton and others on the periphery of the case spin it perhaps
the only way they can. The city and the county have successfully
investigated and brought one of their own to trial, even if it meant
keeping him on the city payroll for nearly a year and a half while he
remained in custody.
And now they're ready for closure.
"There's some people who may feel that things like this may be swept
under the rug, but this shows that we're able to confront this,"
Stockton said. "All I really can say is it's time that we get this
taken care of one way or another."
Escalating arrests
Pelo, who had 17 years on the force, was first arrested in June 2006
on an attempted residential burglary charge after being found outside
a woman's home late at night dressed in black. He claimed he was wound
up from studying for an exam to become a lieutenant and was house
hunting for his mother-in-law.
The officer who responded to the scene let him go that night, but Pelo
was arrested the next morning. The woman whose house he was found near
then claimed she had seen Pelo watching her from his car outside her
work two months before the June incident, and that he had briefly
followed her. Pelo was charged with stalking but bonded out of jail
after posting $30,000 on a $300,000 bond, an unusually large amount.
Pelo's attorney at the time revealed that prosecutors sought the
inflated bond for those alleged crimes because prosecutors wanted to
keep him jailed as they gathered evidence to connect him to a string
of similar rapes from 2002 through 2005.
Within a month, they had. Pelo was arrested again in July 2006 and
charged in a 35-count indictment with multiple aggravated criminal
sexual assault counts for four rapes. Eighteen of the counts stemmed
from the last alleged attack on Jan. 26, 2005. The indictment alleges
he raped the woman twice and assaulted her with other objects. The
other attacks, according to the indictment, were Dec. 18, 2002; April
4, 2003; and Jan. 4, 2005.
At the time of the indictment, police found a mask, pry bar and other
items in Pelo's home they say were used in at least one of the
assaults. Prosecutors also have said three of the accusers identified
him from photo lineups and two identified him by voice.
Another police search turned up pornographic images of bondage and
rape on Pelo's home computer.
The FBI and State Police also have tested a human hair found on a
pillow case in the bedroom of one of the women raped in 2005, another
hair attached to a piece of duct tape used to bind one of the women
and cat hair found on the ski mask taken from Pelo's garage.
According to Pelo's attorney, Michael Rosenblat, none of those tests
linked his client to the crimes.
"All of the results from the FBI and state crimes labs have excluded
Mr. Pelo as a suspect," Rosenblat said during a court hearing last
August.
Rosenblat, without elaboration, also has said FBI analysis of
fingerprints found at the scene of the 2005 attack show that they're
not Pelo's. Defense attorneys also have said the charges are based on
shaky identifications from women who saw only a man in a ski mask in
their darkened bedrooms and who were asked more than a year later to
identify him.
At the time of Pelo's arrest, advocates for rape victims voiced their
fears that Pelo's arrest could hinder other victims from reporting
crimes, a majority of which historically go unreported to authorities.
But Yadira Ruiz, director of the Bloomington YWCA Stepping Stones
Sexual Assault Support Services, said those concerns ultimately have
been unfounded. In fact, she said, the manner in which Pelo's case has
been handled has given her team of counselors evidence of the gravity
with which rape cases are handled to present to victims.
"In this situation, I don't necessarily hear anybody expressing
anything about it," she said. "It almost seems like we can tell
people, 'Look, our county did not just drop it or try to hide it but
took it seriously and sought justice.' "
Trail to trial
Pelo, now 43, has remained jailed on $2 million bond since his second
arrest, and he continued to collect his $81,000 annual salary until
fall of 2007, when he unexpectedly resigned in a letter sent to the
city from the jail. The city could have conducted a hearing with the
Police and Fire Commission to change Pelo's status to unpaid
administrative leave but declined that option because evidence that
would have come up in the criminal trial would have been presented and
victims would have had to testify.
Pelo has been through three defense teams since his arrest, as well.
Pelo's first lawyer, Steve Skelton, withdrew from the case for
unspecified medical reasons, and his second defense team withdrew
because Pelo couldn't pay them. Rosenblat took the case nearly a year
ago and will proceed with the case through trial.
Rosenblat walked into a case of nearly unprecedented proportions: more
than 10,000 pages of documents about evidence and a list of
prosecution witnesses exceeding 500 people.
In the months leading to Monday's jury selection, Rosenblat has been
denied an expert on eyewitness testimony and a motion to move the
trial from Bloomington, a city of about 68,000 people where the case
has generated intense news coverage.
Associate Judge Robert Frietag, however, has left open the possibility
that the trial still could be moved if an impartial jury can't be
seated. That process begins Monday morning.
Mark Messman, chief felony prosecutor for the McLean County State's
Attorney's Office, said jury selection could take anywhere from a day
to a week, and the trial could last three to six weeks. As many as 125
witnesses could be called between both the state and the defense.
Messman also said that despite the media attention paid to the case,
much of the crucial evidence has remained out of publicly available
reports - and that should keep the trial in McLean County.
"I think the (jury selection) process itself will dictate (whether the
case remains in the county)," he said. "I'm optimistic that we'll be
able to seat a fair and impartial jury."
Matt Buedel can be reached at 686-3154 or mbuedel @pjstar.com.
http://www.pjstar.com/stories/051108/REG_BGIVSD40.053.php
--
Anne, indigoace at aol period com
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