Seven months after an Air Force recruiter's assistant told investigators her boss sexually assaulted her in an office supply room, the young woman was summoned to meet his defense attorneys.
Although she had no lawyer to represent her, and no prosecutor accompanied her to the interview, she felt comfortable entering their office alone in January at Joint Base San Antonio-Lackland.
Prosecutors told her it was routine. And she anticipated the defense questions to roughly track the same territory she covered with prosecutors, centered on the facts of her account.
Not so in the military justice system, in which sexual assault victims often face hours of questions from defense attorneys outside the presence of prosecutors with no one to advise them on their legal rights, a common practice that has no match in civilian criminal courts.
The defense attorney leading the questions, Maj. Willie Babor, soon took the interview to personal ground.
Was she aware the defendant, Tech. Sgt. Jaime Rodriguez, had a family and children? Babor asked. Did she know her accusations against Rodriguez carried the death penalty? How would she feel about his children growing up without a father?
She was shocked. She was even more confused when Babor started asking for details of her sexual history and problems in her marriage.
Before the three-hour interview was over, Babor had prompted the 20-year-old airman to name her previous sexual partners, identify anyone who'd witnessed her drink alcohol underage and sign a memo stating Rodriguez used no “force” against her — a term she equated with violence that causes injury, she said.
“I had no idea what questions I didn't have to answer,” said the Air Force analyst, identified as Victim 9 in Rodriguez's trial last week. “It was very overwhelming. I just wanted to crawl under a rock.”
Her case illustrates a little-known aspect of the military judicial system that often grants defense lawyers a degree of access to victims that is almost unheard of in civilian criminal courts, according to military law experts, victims and advocates.
Many victims also face intrusive and irrelevant questions at evidentiary hearings where commanders, who are not legally trained judges, can grant wide latitude to defense attorneys seeking to impeach a witness's credibility.
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