Sept. 26--STAMFORD -- A Stamford judge Tuesday morning declared a mistrial in the case of a Norwalk police officer accused of sexually assaulting the daughter of a close Greenwich friend because an expert witness improperly testified about the credibility of the alleged victim.
The defense attorney for Norwalk police officer Anthony Santo said that he was pleased Judge Richard Comerford declared a mistrial in the case after five days of testimony in the trial, in which the 18-year police veteran was being charged with felony counts of second-degree sexual assault and risk of injury to a minor.
After Santo's attorney, Gary Mastronardi, filed a motion for a mistrial Monday morning, Comerford ruled that the testimony offered Thursday by Child Guidance Center's Dr. Larry Rosenberg was so prejudicial to Santo that even striking his testimony would not keep the jurors from considering it in their deliberations.
Santo, 44, declined comment.
Comerford called the mistrial because of a new state Supreme Court ruling that Mastronardi argued before the state's highest bench earlier this year upholding an appellate court reversal of the conviction of a Fairfield man on felony risk of injury charges. In that case, the Supreme Court agreed that the trial court abused its discretion by allowing an expert witness to indirectly testify about the truthfulness of a complaint's allegations.
"I know something about this," Mastronardi said about expert witness testimony to a group of lawyers while explaining that his trial had been thrown out by Comerford.
The prosecutor in the case, Senior Assistant State's Attorney Maureen Ornowski, called the judge's decision to toss the trial "draconian" and "extremely unfair to the victim."
The attorneys and Comerford will meet again Oct. 24 to determine what comes next. There are no scheduled dates to pick another jury.
The trial that began a week ago Tuesday was years in the making after Greenwich police received a report in July 2009 of an allegation of sexual abuse of a girl that occurred some years earlier.
Police heard about the accusation when the girl's boyfriend told police she had been abused just days before she and Santo were to take a trip to Florida together to visit his mother.
When police talked to the girl, then 18, she said Santo put his hand underneath her pajamas and touched her genitals.
At trial last week the girl, now 20, could not remember exactly when it happened, but believed that it happened when she was 13 during a power outage. The girl's identity is being withheld by Hearst Connecticut Newspapers because she is an alleged victim in the case.
The girl said she and Santo were lying on a couch in her living room with her father and brother sleeping next to the couch when Santo touched her.
The girl testified that Santo was like a "second father" and she did not tell anyone about the encounter until she told her boyfriend about it sometime in the fall of 2007.
The girl said she was too young to understand what happened.
"I did not know it was wrong," she said during her more than three hours of testimony in the case.
When the girl's father took the stand, he said he did not believe the allegation when it surfaced because it looked to him as though his daughter's boyfriend wanted to scuttle the Florida trip with Santo because he was jealous. He told the police to break off the investigation because he wanted to "work through it as a family," he said last week.
The father, who has known Santo for 26 years, said Santo explained to him that his daughter was wrongfully remembering an incident when she confided to him about being groped by a boy some time earlier and the girl took his hand and placed it at the area where she said she was touched.
During testimony Thursday, Ornowski called Rosenberg, clinical director of the Child Guidance Center, to the stand to testify about how common it is for children to keep the allegations of sexual assault to themselves.
During a part of his testimony Rosenberg said that 93 percent to 95 percent of the children who alleged sexual abuse are being truthful. And the vast majority of the remaining five to seven percent were found to be coached into false allegations by their parents, who were involved in some sort of custody dispute or divorce.
Because there were no allegations of custody or divorce implications in the trial Comerford said, the inference that the girl was a victim of sexual abuse was inescapable.
"Essentially what he was saying was the woman was telling the truth," Comerford said.
Comerford admitted that an error had been made in allowing Rosenberg's testimony on the percentages of truthful minor sex-abuse victims. And as a result, substantial damage was done to the defendant's case.
After arguments by Ornowski to allow the case to go to the jury, Mastronardi said if his client was found guilty he was certain that Santo would be given a new trial on appeal.
Comerford seemed to agree, saying that no matter what is said to a jury disregarding testimony offered in a case, "It just doesn't work in the real world."
He said as a remedy the testimony could be stricken, but he was worried that the action would just highlight Rosenberg's testimony to the jury.
Copyright 2012 - The Stamford Advocate, Conn.
