An Ellisville jury took just over a half hour Tuesday to return a verdict of “not guilty” on charges of sexual battery and molestation against Jonathan Smith of Moselle.
Just before the jurors retired to the jury room to make their decision, they heard Jones County Assistant District Attorney Kristen Martin tell them that “This case is about the theft of innocence from a little girl . . . she will never get that back.”
Hattiesburg-based attorney Chris Farris, in his closing arguments to the jurors, said, “There’s more to this story. We just scratched the surface.”
The jury heard approximately four hours of combined testimony on Monday afternoon and Tuesday morning, including watching two video interviews of the child, one by Captain Tonya Madison of the Jones County Sheriff’s Department and another by a child behavioral professional at a Gulfport clinic. In the video accounts and in court testimony from the child, the child’s mother, the child’s bus driver and law enforcement personnel, jurors heard descriptions of alleged sexual conduct between the defendant and one of his four children. The female child was eight years old at the time of the reported incidences, which the witnesses testified occurred during the months of March and April of 2018.
According to testimony from the stand, the child and the defendant had allegedly watched porn together before unlawful acts were perpetrated with the child. The jury heard from the child’s bus driver that she had learned of the allegations from an older student on her bus that the child had told. The bus driver then conveyed that information to the child’s mother, who testified that she confronted her husband of 11 years about the reports and then packed up and left. He denied the accusations, she noted.
“I was furious. I was angry. I was mad. I had so many emotions going on,” the mother said. She and her husband are now in the final stages of a divorce.
Farris, however, on cross-examination extracted some additional facts, such as the mother had taken her children to see their father after the reported unlawful acts and that she had engaged in sexual relations with her husband after the accusations involving their child. She also shared from the stand that the children had seen pornography multiple times on one of her Kindle devices, something she testified that she nor her husband approved of.
Farris also asserted that the child’s mother had coached her daughter on what to blame her father with and what to say during her (child’s) testimony. The mother denied both contentions. The lawyer also told the jurors that at least part of the video testimony they observed was comprised of leading questions by the interviewers that the child just agreed with.
“The truth is always consistent,” stated Farris. “It appears to me that there was a story told, and the child was having trouble keeping up with the facts.”
Farris also informed the jury that there was no eye witnesses to the alleged misconduct, no physical evidence and no corroborating evidence.
“That’s why we had to put that 10-year-old child on the stand,” responded Martin, pointing out that in most child molestation cases there is no physical evidence available to prosecutors.
Smith chose to not testify in his own defense, and Farris called no other witnesses to the stand. At 2:14 p.m. on Tuesday the jurors returned to the courtroom and pronounced Smith innocent.