Opinion ID: 1953866
Heading Depth: 1
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: A. The Uncontested Facts

Text: Evidence adduced by the parties at trial established the following sequence of events. On January 14, 2002, the complaining witness, J.P., then 14 years of age and a resident of Fairfax County, Virginia, took a dose of a friend's Aderall (a prescription amphetamine variant) while at school. She then left school early without permission and went to a friend's house in Fairfax County, where she spent the remainder of the afternoon using intoxicants, including alcohol and marijuana, that caused her to hallucinate. Later that day, J.P. was told that her parents were looking for her, and she became worried that she would get in trouble if her parents found out about the day's events. [2] Thus, she left her friend's house and made her way to the District of Columbia, where she and appellant Lessane, then age 32, shared drinks and conversation at a Georgetown bar. At approximately 12:30 a.m., J.P. and Lessane took a taxi back to Lessane's apartment in Southeast, where J.P. spent the night. The next morning, J.P. called a friend's mother, Virginia Wilson, from the District and told her that she had awakened in a strange man's apartment and could not remember what had transpired. Ms. Wilson instructed J.P. to take a Metrorail train back to Fairfax County. At the train station in Virginia, J.P. was met by Fairfax County police officers and was eventually transported to the Woodburn Mental Health Center (Woodburn) in Fairfax County for a mental health evaluation. The supervisor of Woodburn's Emergency Service Crisis Intervention Team interviewed J.P. and her parents separately and then together and determined that J.P. did not require psychiatric commitment. When she was first interviewed, J.P. claimed that she had been abducted and raped, but she did not admit what she herself had done in the hours leading up to those alleged events. J.P. later testified at trial that she wanted to tell the truth, but she still feared the consequences of her parents finding out about her misbehavior. Eventually, however, she realized that no one believed [her], and that she would have to tell the truth to get any help. J.P. therefore admitted that she had left school early the day before, used intoxicants, gone to a bar in Georgetown, met a man ( i.e., Lessane), and accompanied him back to his apartment. There, she said, the man had forcibly raped her. As a result of these disclosures, J.P. was taken to Children's National Medical Center (Children's Hospital) in the District during the night of January 15 to 16, 2002, where she was interviewed and examined by medical personnel, and a sexual assault kit was completed. No ligature marks or other external injuries were observed. The sexual assault examination, however, revealed a posterior fourchette [3] tear that would have occurred in the preceding 72 hours. Swabs were taken from inside J.P.'s vagina and rectum, as well as from her lips and the panties she wore during the night she spent in the District. She was also interviewed at Children's Hospital by a Metropolitan Police Department (MPD) detective, who then drove her through Southeast, where she identified Lessane's apartment building as the scene of the assault. J.P. additionally provided the detective with a description of her attacker, as well as a camera and film she had with her on the night in question which she had used the next morning to photograph the exterior of her assailant's apartment building. Twelve days later, J.P. viewed a nine-person photographic array arranged by the MPD and unhesitatingly chose a picture of Lessane as depicting her assailant. Subsequently, Lessane was arrested, a search warrant was executed at his apartment, and he was required to provide blood, hair, and saliva samples for DNA analysis; this analysis revealed that Lessane's DNA matched that of semen traces recovered from the swabs taken inside J.P.'s vagina and rectum during her sexual assault examination.