Deliberations begin in lewd case
SANDPOINT — A Bonner County jury began deliberations Wednesday in the case of an Athol man accused of molesting a 9-year-old girl last year.
Curtis Edward Jackson is charged with three counts of lewd and lascivious conduct with a minor, an offense which can result in a lifelong prison sentence if he’s convicted.
Jackson, 47, took the stand Wednesday to refute the allegations against him and testified that the accusations were sparked by an unfortunate misunderstanding.
“No, I did not,” Jackson repeated in response to questions from his defense attorney, Bryan Whitaker, about whether he had ever touched the girl inappropriately.
The alleged victim in the case testified on Tuesday that Jackson, a former friend of the family, had molested her on two occasions in the summer of 2009 and a third time that subsequent fall. Two of the incidents allegedly occurred while the two were alone in Jackson’s pickup truck and third occurred in the bedroom of her southern Bonner County home.
The girl told jurors the incidents that took place in his truck occurred after she entered the passenger side of the rig. But when Jackson took the stand, he said the passenger door on his truck has been sealed shut for the last two years because of a collision with a tree.
The jury asked for and was granted permission to view the truck in the courthouse parking lot, but counsel for the state and the defense would not agree to let jurors test the door themselves because the panel would have improperly crossed the line into an investigative role.
The Toyota pickup showed body damage to the passenger door and part of the extended cab behind it.
Jurors also viewed a videotaped excerpt of Jackson being questioned by sheriff’s Det. Phyllis Jay after the allegations came to light. During the interview, Jackson claimed that the girl had flashed him on occasion and used that to extort small gifts and money from him by threatening to tell her parents that he had seen her exposed genitalia.
The accusations surfaced after a sibling of the alleged victim found the two together in an upstairs bedroom. The alleged victim’s older sister testified that the girl was pulling up her pants when she came to the room.
Jackson followed the sister down the hall, hugged her and said, “You didn’t see anything.”
Jackson asserted in the detective’s interview that he meant the remark literally, rather than figuratively, because nothing untoward was going on in the room.
Whitaker argued during his closing remarks that the alleged victim fabricated the accusations to escape punishment from her disciplinarian parents and emphasized that a state’s witness corroborated the defense claim that the truck’s passenger door did not work.
“Mister Jackson is the one telling the truth,” Whitaker said.
But Prosecutor Louis Marshall homed in on other statements Jackson made under questioning by Jay. During the interview, Jackson told Jay he decided to avoid the girl’s company to avoid being “tempted.”
“Why would he be tempted?” Marshall asked during his closing argument. “He says it because he is.”