KOBE BRYANT TRIAL Accuser drops criminal case after months of gaffes

The district attorney said he was confident Bryant would have been convicted.
EAGLE, Colo. (AP) -- In essence, the writing was on the wall.
The last-minute dismissal of the Kobe Bryant rape case followed months of gaffes by courthouse staff that put his 20-year-old accuser in an uncomfortable spotlight. A determined, well-financed legal assault from the NBA player's defense team also helped stop the trial before it began.
Legal experts say the prosecution also had a very difficult case to prove -- a he said-she said in which the accuser told investigators she willingly flirted with Bryant and engaged in consensual kissing. Complicating the case was a defense expert who said DNA evidence showed the woman slept with someone else not long after leaving Bryant's hotel room.
"What seems very apparent is the prosecution made missteps early on," said Denver attorney Lisa Wayne, who has defended numerous sexual assault cases. "They never got to know this woman."
During a news conference after the dismissal, District Attorney Mark Hurlbert said he was confident that if a jury had been able to hear the alleged victim testify, Bryant would be convicted.
"The prosecution wants to try this case. I want to try this case," he said. "However, the victim has informed us after much of her own labored determination that she does not want to proceed. For this reason and this reason only I am dismissing the case."
Wendy Murphy, a professor at the New England School of Law, Boston, said Hurlbert was just trying to shift responsibility.
"It's a different way of blaming the victim, it's the government sloughing off onto the victim the failure of the justice system," she said. "It's the prosecutor's job, it's the government's responsibility to pursue this."
One step ahead
Bryant's attorneys were relentless, challenging everything from using the word "victim" in court to seeking to have her mental health history and sex life admitted as evidence.
A key blow to the prosecution came last month, when District Judge Terry Ruckriegle agreed that the woman's sex life in the three days before her hospital exam could be admitted as evidence at trial. The defense said the woman had sex after leaving Bryant and before the exam, a claim her attorneys denied but one that drew widespread publicity before jury selection began.
Larry Pozner, a former president of the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers, said prosecutors and investigators made a fatal mistake by arresting Bryant and filing the charge before having full knowledge of the alleged victim's activities and the DNA test results.
"The defense kept pulling in dump trucks full of evidence until they [prosecutors] drowned in bad facts," he said. "Any time you see the defense ahead of the prosecution it can only be because the prosecution didn't want to know something."
Mistakes
The case also was marred by a series of mistakes, many of them by people the woman's attorneys said she trusted the most.
The accuser's name was included in filings mistakenly posted on a state court Web site and a court reporter accidentally e-mailed transcripts of a closed-door hearing on the woman's sexual activities to seven news organizations, which published the details after winning a First Amendment court fight with the judge.
Within those transcripts was a prelude of what would have come at trial: Testimony from a defense forensics expert who said she was convinced the accuser had sex with someone else soon after leaving Bryant -- a claim that goes to the heart of the woman's credibility and her image as a traumatized victim.
The woman's attorney, John Clune, said those mistakes were key to his client's decision to drop out of the case.
The accuser's decision to file a federal lawsuit against Bryant was another blow to the case, because it gave defense attorneys a chance to argue the woman had a financial motive to accuse Bryant of assault. Bryant's defense team has long argued she falsely accused him to gain the attention of a former boyfriend, and that she was given nearly $20,000 from a victims' compensation fund.