[S]T. ALBANS – A jury hearing the case of former Franklin County state senator accused of prostituting a tenant living and working on his Highgate Farm to a friend for money deliberated Thursday for about 90 minutes without reaching a verdict.
The 12-member panel is expected to return Friday morning to the Franklin County Superior criminal court in St. Albans to continue their deliberations in the trial of Norman McAllister on a misdemeanor charge of committing a prohibited act.
The fast-moving trial started Thursday morning; jurors began deliberations at 3:50 p.m. By about 5:20 p.m. they sent a note to the judge asking if they could go home for the day and return Friday morning.
Judge Michael Kupersmith granted that request, but first had a question of the jurors after they filed back into the courtroom.
“Why?” he asked.
“I think everybody is just tired,” the jury foreperson replied.
“We’re stuck,” said another juror.
It’s the third trial in recent years for the one-time Republican lawmaker since his arrest in 2015 outside the Vermont Statehouse when he was still a sitting senator. More severe charges of sexual assault against McAllister were either dropped or resulted in acquittals.
Following his 2015 arrest, McAllister was suspended from the state senate. He tried to regain his seat in 2016, but lost in the Republican primary.
The trial that began Thursday followed a Vermont Supreme Court decision in November that overturned McAllister’s conviction of the prohibited acts charge. That led to the retrial in the St. Albans courthouse this week, with the jury selected Tuesday.
The testimony Thursday featured his accuser and a couple of state police detectives who investigated the case. McAllister did not take the stand.
Robert Katims, McAllister’s attorney, contended Thursday in his statements to the jury that the evidence against his client was limited to the accuser’s testimony that McAllister prostituted her to one his friends to cover back payments she owed him for rent and utility bills.
“There’s nothing, there’s nothing,” Katims told the jurors. “No one witnesses anything, no one sees anything, no one sees this person coming and going. No one sees an exchange of money. There’s no receipt for payment of an electric bill or a water bill.”
Franklin County Deputy State’s Attorney John Lavoie started off his case by playing a portion of a recorded phone call between the woman and McAllister.
In that call, his accuser spoke with McAllister of plans that the two had previously talked about to prostitute her to migrant farmworkers to make money, with the pair splitting the proceeds.
McAllister, in the call, then responds, “Like you did with that guy that one time?”
Lavoie told the jurors it was McAllister who set up that meeting with “that guy” referred to in the phone call.
“She did it before, he set it up, she followed through,” the prosecutor said. “She’s the one that has to do the dirty work to get the bills paid.”
No meetings with the migrant farmworkers ever took place. The charge against McAllister relates to the allegation he “procured” the woman to have sex with “that guy.”
The woman, called to the stand by Lavoie, testified Thursday that she had been hired to work on McAllister’s farm in 2012. Her job, she said, was to take care of goats for a milking operation, and she also rented a trailer from McAllister on his property.
A few months after moving in, the goat-milking business went defunct and she was low on funds to pay her rent and her utility bills. At one point, she said, when her power was about to off McAllister paid to keep it on.
It’s soon after, in 2013, she said, that McAllister brought up the idea of prostituting her to one of his friends, a single man who wanted to have sex with a woman. She eventually agreed, meeting that man at her trailer.
“He said he assumed I knew what he was there for,” the woman recounted on the witness stand. “I said I did.”
She then said she led to him to a bedroom where they had sex.
The woman testified that she never knew the man’s name, and police have never been able to find him. The woman, in her testimony Thursday, described that man as short, “stout,” and balding.
The woman added that she never received any money from the man. Instead, she testified, it went to McAllister to cover her shortfalls in rent and utility bills.
Later, she said, McAllister told her that his friend said to him that it went well and wanted to know if she was interested in making it a “regular thing.”
The woman testified she didn’t. “I said I wasn’t comfortable with that,” she said on the stand.
During cross examination, Katims, McAllister’s attorney, focused a great deal of his questioning of the woman on a 2012 domestic violence case involving her ex-husband at the time.
Through the questioning, Katims recited allegations from court records and police statements she made in that case against her ex-husband.
The woman admitted Thursday that she had lied, claiming she did so because she wanted her ex-husband out of the house by making an accusation against him she later recanted.
She told police that her ex-husband had physically assaulted, but in a later criminal case against the ex-husband she changed her story.
In his opening and closing arguments to the jury, Katims suggested that the woman’s primary motivation for her allegations against McAllister was to maintain a relationship with her ex-husband.
Had McAllister not played a role in setting up that meeting with the man for sex, Katims suggested, the woman’s ex-husband would be more angry with her for doing it on her own.
The woman testified Thursday that she is currently back together with her ex-husband and he now knows that she alleges McAllister prostituted out her for sex.
And, she said, he’s still upset about it.
Also during his questioning, Katims brought up that during that domestic violence case the woman told a judge of the difficulty she had with her memory, having once been diagnosed dissociative personality disorder.
The woman, under questioning from the prosecutor, said she was not lying in her testimony Thursday about McAllister.
Lavoie, during his closing argument, told the jurors not to be distracted by the separate, past domestic violence case involving the woman.
Instead, he said, the matter for them to decide was whether McAllister’s “procured” the woman for prostitution.
“There is no contrary evidence, I want you to keep that in mind,” the prosecutor said, adding, “A suggestion on cross-examination is not evidence.”
Lavoie added that the woman was in a state of desperation to stay in the trailer and not become homeless, and McAllister knew it.
“The power dynamic here is what drives the whole situation,” the prosecutor told the jury.
Other than the woman’s words, Katims countered in his closing argument to jurors, there’s nothing linking his client to the charged crime.
Katims then added, “There’s no evidence whatsoever Mr. McAllister was involved in this other than (the woman’s) testimony.”
As he sent the jurors home Thursday, Judge Kupersmith told them to keep away from media coverage of the trial. He also told them to relax.
“Think spring thoughts,” he told the jurors.
