Case Story: Saving a Client from North Dakota’s Most Serious Felony

The sexual abuse of a child might be the worst crime a person can commit. It’s also the one that garners the least sympathy from society writ large. And as bad as it is, it’s even worse when the abuse is committed by a relative, especially a parent.

The logic is simple. 

We entrust parents with the sacred duty of taking care of their children and protecting them from harm. And we teach children to believe this, and to trust that they are implicitly safe with their mom or dad.

So when a parent sexually abuses a child, they violate this most basic code that holds our social fabric together. 

It’s a crime both against the child and against society and our norms and values. It’s so bad that, when it happens, society is collectively prepared to spare no mercy. 

In short, a parent who abuses a child will spend most of the rest of their life behind bars. 

The seriousness of the crime is also why it’s so important to get these charges and convictions right. 

Being wrongly accused of a crime is bad enough, but being wrongly accused of sexually abusing your child? Few things are worse. 

That’s what this case is about.

Our client’s daughter made several graphic sexual abuse allegations against him. Our client denied them in their entirety. Without doing any investigative work other than taking the girl’s word at face value, the state charged our client with multiple AA felonies—the most serious charges allowed under North Dakota law. 

Facing more or less a mandatory life sentence, our client hired us, and we began to investigate the daughter’s claims. We soon realized what our client had said all along: the girl had fabricated it all. We eventually got the charges dismissed, but not before our client’s life—and his family’s life—was all but ruined.

Here’s how we did it.

The Charge

Our client is an over-the-road truck driver who often travels for work. During a trip to Iowa, without warning, police arrested him while he was sleeping in the cab of his truck in the parking lot of a truck stop. Since he had done nothing wrong, the arrest came as a complete surprise. 

Police eventually told him about the charges against him: sexual abuse of his daughter. This, too, shocked our client, since nothing like that had ever occurred.

Not wanting to say anything until he figured out what was going on, our client invoked his right to silence and smartly refused to give any statement to the police.

Authorities then extradited our client back to North Dakota to face the charges against him. 

Unsure what to do, our client reached out to friends and family for help. Luckily, his mother, who lived in California, came to his aid and began working to secure a lawyer for her son.

She found us, hired us to help her son, and that’s how we got involved.

As always, we quickly got to work.

The Investigation

First, we met with the client and got his story about the allegations. He told us that his daughter had made it up, that he didn’t do it, and that there was a way to prove it.

So we hired an investigator to do just that. And not just any investigator: a former FBI agent who only works on cases in which he believes the person accused of a crime is innocent.

With him on board, we were ready to dismantle the girl’s story brick by brick.

How did we do it?

First, the truck logs.

Remember our client was a truck driver. The company he worked for kept meticulous records related to his travel. And so the logs could prove when he was and was not in the city where his daughter claimed the sexual assaults occurred.

According to our client, on one of the alleged sexual assault dates, he was certain he was out of the state of North Dakota trucking.

Let’s write that again.

The truck logs were smoking-gun proof that at least one sexual assault could not have occurred because our client was not in North Dakota when it supposedly happened.

We felt like the dog that had caught the car. This was it, we thought. Once we brought this to the state’s attention, they’d dismiss. After all, if the girl lied about this allegation, what else might she have lied about?

So we told the state.

And they had the chance to do the right thing.

And they didn’t.

So we did something that criminal defense attorneys in North Dakota rarely do: we conducted a fully contested preliminary hearing. (A preliminary hearing is a hearing where the state has to prove that they have enough evidence to justify the charge and to allow the case to move forward.)

At the hearing, we cross-examined the lead detective in the case until he had to concede that many accusations against our client fell apart upon scrutiny. After the hearing, the detective came up to us and said he was impressed by our work.

In fact, we did such a good job casting doubt on the truthfulness of the allegations that the judge dropped our client’s bond from $500,000 to $50,000.

The Partial Dismissal

Despite all this, the prosecutor still would not dismiss the case outright.

But in the face of this unassailable evidence, the prosecutor had to dismiss the charge related to that specific allegation. But they kept the other ones that the daughter said happened.

They basically said, yes, we agree she lied about A, but we still believe her when it comes to B and C. Given her record, this logic felt crazy to us.

But rather than getting mad, we put our head down and just worked harder.

The Investigation Continues

Now knowing the girl was lying, we brainstormed how else to prove it. The best idea came from our investigator: test the physics of the girl’s story.

So we picked the most serious facts alleged and set out to disprove them.

In one supposed assault, our client’s daughter claimed that he zip-tied her to a bed and then sexually assaulted her. During the assault, she also claimed that she thrashed, fought, and tried to break loose, but couldn’t.

First, we figured out the type of bed that was in the daughter’s room when she claimed this happened, and found the exact model at Walmart. The box stated the maximum weight the bed could support was about 250 lbs.

This presented a problem because our client himself weighed more than 275 lbs., so by the time you added in the daughter’s weight, the bed would have broken and collapsed.

But in the photos from the scene, and based on our investigator’s inspection of the home, the bed was still completely intact.

Second, during our investigator’s trip to the home, he searched for thrashing-related marks on the bedposts. The idea being that had this really happened, there would be some sort of marks from the plastic zip ties rubbing against the wooden bedposts.

But there was none. The posts were completely intact and unscathed.

A second smoking gun.

Even armed with this new evidence, we decided going back to the state was useless, and so we instead moved to dismiss the case for lack of probable cause. We highlighted our investigation, our findings, and our conclusion: that our client’s daughter was lying.

It’s never easy to call a child a liar, but here, we had no choice.

The Full Dismissal

Before the judge decided on our motion, the state dismissed the case.

And, really, what other choice did they have?

The girl’s credibility was shot. We knew it. They knew it. The judge knew it.

So rather than proceeding to trial and opening her up to cross-examination questions about her story, the state cut its losses and dismissed the case.

It’s important to highlight just how rare this is.

The state first charged our client with three AA felonies, each carrying harsh mandatory sentences. And they did so based solely on the testimony of the daughter.

They had the same evidence as us. They had access to the trucking records from our client’s employer. They had information about the bed and the zip ties. They had it all.

They just either chose to not see it, or to not look hard enough.

It was only when we forced them to look did they finally relent.

We saved our client’s life, but the facts of the case make clear he should have never been charged at all.

He won, but in these cases, nobody ever truly wins.

The Takeaway

There is much to say about what happened here. And there’s much blame to go around.

First, our client’s daughter is to blame for making these false allegations. Both because it severely harmed her father and her family, but also because it harms true victims of sexual assault.

For each time a person is wrongfully accused, it allows people who really do commit these types of crimes to point at cases like this one to try say that their victim—like the daughter here—is lying.

There’s a saying that 1 wrongful accusation taints 99 true ones. We aren’t sure about that, but there’s no doubt that what this girl did here will hurt real future victims.

Next, the state is to blame for its shoddy, lackluster investigation. When we heard the allegations, we were immediately skeptical.

How could they not have been, too?

Why weren’t there checks and balances in place to figure this out before charging a man and ruining his life?

If it were so easy for us to see, how could they not see it, too?

We think the answer is a common theme we see in these types of “act first, think later” cases: the state heard a story they wanted to believe and wouldn’t take no for an answer.

At least not at first. Not until we forced them.

Eventually they did, but the collateral damage of their conduct is immeasurable.

Ultimately, we are equal parts happy and sad for our client.

He’s free, but at what cost?