Case Story: Winning at trial by exposing the accuser’s lies

Domestic abuse is a scourge on society.

And while there are some instances of women harming men, the vast majority occurs when men hit and hurt women. In fact, intimate partner violence is one of the most common forms of violence in the United States.

It’s sad, but true. And it’s never OK. And it’s always abhorrent. And it needs to stop.

But what about when someone claims they were abused by their significant other, but it’s not really true? It’s just them angry and trying to get the other person in trouble.

That’s what this case is about.

Our client was arrested and charged with a violent assault of his girlfriend, in which she claims to have broken her face and ankle. But after talking with our client, we began to question the truthfulness of his girlfriend’s account of what happened.

So we pulled out all stops, investigated the case like we had never investigated one before, prepared for trial, and secured a not guilty verdict.

Here’s how we did it.

The Incident

One Monday morning, our office got an urgent call from our then-prospective client.

He was worried that he was going to be charged with domestic assault. Something had happened Saturday night. And while we are used to clients being vague about the facts on the phone, this felt different. We couldn’t tell exactly why our client was so nervous.

It felt like something was terribly wrong.

So we got him into our office and he told us the story: many years before, our client had become friends with an older woman. At some point, this woman introduced him to her daughter. The daughter later became our client’s girlfriend. But our client and his girlfriend’s mom nonetheless remained friends.

Early on, our client noticed that his girlfriend would get particularly erratic when she was drinking. It turned out that she had a pill addiction as well. This cocktail of alcohol and pills made her behave very bizarrely; she would get angry and wouldn’t necessarily follow what other people were saying.

In short, the relationship was mostly good, but when our client’s girlfriend was impaired, things could get dicey.

Against this backdrop, one Saturday night our client and his girlfriend had gone out to the bar. They met up with our client’s friend and his girlfriend. It was a pleasant evening, at least for a while. At some point, our client’s girlfriend started flirting with guys at the bar. Because our client was an easygoing guy, he wasn’t worried. But somehow, his girlfriend started projecting her flirtatious impulses on our client and accused him of being the flirty one.

This led to one of those stupid bar arguments.

Our client’s girlfriend then left the bar in a huff and got a ride back to their home. Now alone, our client got in his truck and—against his better judgment—drove home himself.

Once home, our client’s girlfriend confronted him aggressively. She accused him of cheating on her. She was yelling and screaming.

Our client kept his composure.

Standing in the living room, she lunged at him. Our client moved out of the way, and his girlfriend tripped, falling flat on her face. In an instant, her orbital bone shattered. Our client helped her up, and she shrugged him off, screaming, “Get away!”

Our client went downstairs and sat on his bed, terrified about what was going to happen. He knew that as soon as he called 911, he was guaranteeing that he would be arrested. As he sat there in silence, he heard his girlfriend walking to the top of the stairs.

All of a sudden, he heard a huge crash and his girlfriend was at the bottom of the stairwell–in her intoxicated and angry state, she fell down the stairs and broke her ankle.

Not knowing who else to call, our client phoned his friend–his girlfriend’s mom. Unfortunately, she immediately took her daughter’s side, picked her up from the house, and took her to the hospital.

Despite our client’s best efforts, he could not help his friend understand the truth.

The Charge

As noted above, the Monday after this happened, our client called us.

He was not arrested or charged, but he knew it was coming because he had received a call from a police officer. We called the police officer back and got a read on the state of the charges. It was clear they were coming, so we coordinated our client’s surrender.

In the midst of all this, we also immediately got our investigator involved, taking witness statements and beginning an investigation of the accuser.

Our client was first charged with 5th degree domestic assault. The complaint was terrible and it was clear that more charges would be coming. But we got him bailed out and continued to prepare the defense.

Importantly, because our client called us right after the incident, we were able to advise him to remain silent at the most important time–when passions are heated and people under investigation are desperate to exonerate themselves.

These types of statements nearly always do more harm than good. Fortunately, we didn’t have to worry about that here.

Our investigation was all encompassing: we spoke to everyone at the bar who knew our client and his girlfriend, we investigated our client’s friend (his girlfriend’s mom), we investigated his girlfriend–everything that we possibly could.

All the while, we spent countless hours together with our client, discussing the facts and his life overall. We believed that he would need to testify on his own behalf, and we wanted to understand everything so that he would be ready.

The more hours we prepared to defend the case, the clearer it became that the house itself would be very important for the jury to understand.

There were two locations that were most  important: (1) the living room and (2) the staircase. We needed to show where our client was when his girlfriend lunged at him and be able to describe how he moved out of the way. But much more importantly, we needed to be able to very clearly describe the staircase.

After hours of thinking, we had figured out a problem with the prosecution’s case that just might win everything.

As we feared, the prosecutor upgraded the charges from 5th degree domestic assault to 3rd degree assault. This meant that our client was now facing a felony. He was looking at serious jail time, a felony conviction, and all kinds of collateral consequences that could disturb his life for the rest of his life.

The upgraded charges didn’t change the defense strategy exactly, but they did force us to discuss the possibility of resolution with our client. There is an old expression in criminal defense: “Some deals are so good that even an innocent person should take them.” That’s because unfortunately, when the consequences of losing at trial involve losing everything, taking a deal that keeps you from going to prison might be worth it, even if it is terrible.

Ultimately, our client didn’t want to take a deal, so we continued to prepare for trial.

First, we filed a notice of self-defense. This was tricky because during the actual incident, when our client’s ex-girlfriend lunged at him, he had gently pushed her out of the way. Under normal circumstances, this kind of gentle nudge wouldn’t be regarded as self-defense. But we wanted to have it as an option. Knowing that the prosecutor would fight tooth and nail to keep us from using self-defense at trial, we did all the legal research necessary to support our client’s right to use it.

As we approached trial, the prosecutor upgraded the charges again: now our client was facing a 1st degree assault. The state was claiming that our client’s girlfriend was suffering from a severely impaired ability to walk from the broken ankle and paralysis of the face from the broken orbital bone. If they could prove either of them, and they could prove that our client intentionally assaulted her and caused the injuries, he would be sent to prison for more than seven years.

Faced with this significant escalation by the state, we did something that we had never before done in a criminal case and haven’t done since: we sent our investigator on a stakeout.

Stakeouts in criminal work are rare because they are expensive—you have to pay your investigator a high hourly rate to just sit in their car—and because it’s rare for anything good to come out of a stakeout. But we wanted a video of our client’s girlfriend walking and possibly talking, to defeat the new 1st degree assault charges.

We used the very best investigator and spared no expense. He recorded our client’s girlfriend and her mom walking out of Walmart. Our client’s girlfriend was walking with a normal gait and apparently talking to her mom without any paralysis of her face.

After decades as an investigator for both law enforcement and defense, our investigator has a great nose for these situations and decided to follow them home and interview them. They came to the door and spoke to our investigator for almost an hour. While they spent most of the time saying nasty things about our client, we got absolute proof that the girlfriend could walk easily, and that her face was as animated as ever.

Finally, unbeknownst to her, she said something that would completely destroy her credibility at trial.

We now had our defense prepared. It was time for trial.

The Trial

No matter how great your preparation is, it matters only if you get the right jury who is willing to actually hear your case.

And here, we needed to pick a jury that would give our client the reasonable doubt he deserved.

Anytime someone is accused of assaulting someone weaker than they are, a random jury is likely to presume that he did it. We knew that a jury would focus on two things: the behavior of victims of domestic violence, and logic.

When our client is faced with a false accusation of domestic violence, we nearly always leave victims of domestic violence on the jury. They understand what the experience of being a victim in that situation is like and can tell when someone is manufacturing an accusation.

Bruce Ringstrom Jr., our firm’s senior trial attorney, gave an opening statement that was pretty matter-of-fact, laying out the facts as we were confident they would come out. But he also held back just a few things so that the prosecutor wouldn’t have an opportunity to help her witnesses “remember” things differently.

There were a number of witnesses, but the most important ones from the prosecution were the accuser and the emergency room physician.

Our client’s girlfriend—by now his ex-girlfriend—testified to the main accusations: she said that our client punched her in the face and sent her spiraling down the stairs. Because Bruce knew about the problems with these assertions, he actually helped her describe these events in great detail.

Notably, she testified that when our client punched her, she saw him do it.

Then she testified about something called "relationship evidence.” In Minnesota, prosecutors are allowed to bring forth evidence of prior relationship issues. Typically this means that the alleged victim gets to testify to all the times the defendant assaulted them before.

And that’s exactly what happened here.

The ex-girlfriend testified that just two weeks before the alleged incident, our client had brutally struck her on the face. Knowing something she didn’t, Bruce gave her all the opportunity to describe this in great detail. He also asked her about the call to 911 about the earlier incident (there wasn’t one) and the call to her mom about the earlier incident (there wasn’t one).

From the outside, it didn’t look like Bruce had made much progress in our cross-examination of the accuser. Even our client seemed to be getting nervous.

Then the emergency room doctor testified to the injuries he observed. This was an interesting cross-examination. For important strategic reasons, we didn’t want to destroy the doctor’s credibility with the jury. So Bruce was pretty gentle in getting the doctor to agree that whatever the injuries looked like when he examined the alleged victim, the functioning of her body would need to be evaluated many months later.

Bruce then asked a set of questions that the prosecutor wasn’t anticipating; in fact, we could tell that she didn’t even understand what they meant for the case:

• Did the doctor observe any marks or bruises on his patient’s face beside on her eye socket: “No.”

• Did he notice any healing bruises? “No.”

• Did he notice any indicia of traumatic injury to his patient more than a few hours old? “No.”

Bruce said “no more questions” and the doctor was excused.

We called three witnesses, but the two most important ones were our private investigator and our client himself.

Our investigator testified to the layout of the house, including the very narrow and steep staircase. Our client’s house was made in the 1940s and had the kind of staircase that can make anyone nervous: not just steep but narrow, with a low ceiling.

Then our investigator testified about his interview with our client’s ex-girlfriend at her front step.

He testified about her smooth walking and her clear talking. And he testified to one specific thing she had testified to: What did she tell you about whether she saw our client hit her? “She said that she did not see him hit her.”

This was the first moment that the jury really started to shift and recognize that this case was not what they thought. The ex-girlfriend had just sworn under oath that she saw him hit her, but a few weeks before that, she told our investigator that she did NOT see it. Both times, she said this with conviction.

We let that sit with the jury and moved to our next witness—our client.

He was a normal guy: a high school graduate who worked in manufacturing. A simple man who spoke in simple sentences.

Early on, he had been terrified that the prosecutor would twist him into knots when he testified. But we had worked through all the possible questions, and we reminded him that all he had to do was tell the truth.

His direct examination was authentic and heartfelt. He cared deeply about his girlfriend and denied ever doing anything to hurt her. The cross-examination was tough, but he gave honest and authentic answers that clearly moved the jury.

The prosecutor picked up that our client had had perhaps four or five drinks at the bar–certainly too many to drive. And so she asked him, “Do you really think you should have been driving that night?” She knew that if he said “No, I was fine” that it would have weakened his credibility. But we had planned for this and told our client to tell the truth. And so he openly said, “Yeah, I shouldn’t have been driving. That was definitely my mistake.”

You could see the jury warm to him.

Usually, by the time closing arguments begin, the case is mostly determined. The jury has heard the opening statements, and listened to and viewed all the evidence. They have been investigating the case the whole time and have been making connections.

But we knew that the dots had not yet been connected.

After the prosecutor’s impassioned closing argument for guilty verdicts, Bruce walked up to the lectern and placed his notes. Bruce usually stands close to his notes, making sure to say the words that h so carefully crafted for the jury.

But on this day, Bruce grabbed a chair and sat down in front of the jury. He put his head in his hands and spoke to himself like our client did when he was sitting on his bed in his basement, knowing that he would be going to jail. While Bruce said a lot to the jury, his most important work was connecting the dots on three massive problems with the state’s case.

The first was the emergency room doctor.

His testimony about how the girlfriend had no old bruises or injuries a week or two old not only told the jury that our client hadn’t abused his girlfriend in the past, but also that his girlfriend had lied under oath to them about it.

The second was the lie about what the girlfriend saw when our client “punched” her.

The mistake that the girlfriend made is what is known as an “unforced error.” She told our investigator that she did not see the “punch” and then a week or two later testified to the jury that she DID see the “punch.” One more lie, one more reason for the jury to disregard her testimony.

The third was what happened when she fell down the stairs.

She gave a horrific description of how she went spiraling down the stairs, breaking her ankle because of our client’s “brutality.” Bruce simply stood in front of the jury and said, “You have heard the investigator’s testimony about this staircase, and you have seen the pictures. We have all been in an old house like this. Take your time and just imagine how her tale could even work in real life. If she had been punched in the face and cartwheeled down the stairs, it would have had to have been in a much larger stairwell. Think about it and discuss it together; it couldn’t have happened here.”

As he was finishing this argument, two or three jurors actually closed their eyes and tried to imagine it. We could see them smirking in disbelief at what the prosecution’s star witness had been selling them.

Ninety minutes later, the jury found our client NOT GUILTY on all counts. Rarely have we seen anyone so happy or relieved. And for Bruce, it was one of the highlights of his career.

The Takeaway

The week after trial, we met with a different client on his case.

This other client was a coworker of a juror from the trial.

This juror–a woman who had herself been a victim of domestic abuse–recounted the trial and said that she was offended that this person made up such a horrific accusation of domestic abuse: “She almost ruined his life, and she made it harder for actual victims to get justice.”

Innocent people are charged with the most horrific crimes.

A lawyer care deeply for his client and be prepared to tell the full story to the jury to get justice.

That’s what we did for our client here. And what we’ll do for you.