U.S. District Judge Michael W. Fitzgerald blamed Jane Doe’s legal team for not providing the Defense (Derrick Rose) with three text messages she sent to Rose around the time of the alleged assault. However, despite Rose’s attempt to call for a mistrial, he isn’t getting out of this civil rape case easily.
Judge Fitzgerald did not believe the failure to provide the text messages was serious enough to end the trial. With that said, he also ruled that the woman could be questioned by Derrick Rose’s lawyers again. Also, the jurors would be told of the plaintiff’s because the texts “could be viewed as favorable to the defense” and telling jurors that they weren’t initially available to Rose’s team would “cure that prejudice.”
“Any failure to give texts was inadvertent,” said the woman’s lawyer, Brandon Anand. “There was no attempt to keep anything hidden.”
According to Rose’s lawyer Mark Baute, the texts show that the woman willingly went along with the request that she and a friend come over to his house for sex. In one of these messages which occurred after the woman and her friend left Rose’s home, the plaintiff disapproved of Rose refusing to have sex with her friend after she went to the trouble of arranging the threesome.
Baute says that he believes the texts were “selectively omitted” and to believe that it was an innocent mistake is “naivete at an extreme level.”
What are your thoughts?
