photo by: Sara Shepherd

A man convicted of raping a teenager he met at a Lawrence bar will not face an additional trial on a related rape charge the jury couldn’t agree on.

Instead, Albert N. Wilson, 23, of Wichita, will be sentenced for the single rape conviction the jury returned last week.

On Wednesday, Wilson appeared in Douglas County District Court to determine the next steps for his case. Prosecutor Amy McGowan said the District Attorney’s Office intended to dismiss the second charge, and Judge Sally Pokorny scheduled Wilson’s sentencing for Feb. 20.

The jury convicted Wilson of leading a 17-year-old girl he met at a Lawrence college bar to his home nearby and forcibly raping her.

Wilson had been charged with a second count of rape, for allegedly assaulting the girl under her skirt on the dance floor before they left for his house. However, the jury — unable to agree on a verdict — hung on that count.

After taking in two and a half days of testimony and arguments during Wilson’s trial last week, the jury deliberated close to six hours before announcing the verdict about 5:15 p.m. Thursday.

The incident happened on a Saturday night in September 2016.

Wilson and the victim met inside the Jayhawk Cafe, known as the Hawk, just off the University of Kansas campus at 1340 Ohio St.

Wilson was a KU student at the time. The girl was a high school student from the Kansas City area, visiting her cousin at KU. Both were underage — Wilson used a friend’s ID to get in, and the girl wasn’t carded at all.

At trial, the victim testified that she’d been drinking before going to the bar and was drunker than she’d ever been, eventually feeling dizzy and like she was going to pass out.

She said Wilson first lifted her skirt and assaulted her in the Boom Boom Room — the dark, crowded dance floor in the basement of the Hawk.

She said he then led her, stumbling, to his home a couple of blocks away. There, she repeatedly told him, “No, I’m too drunk, I can’t do this,” but Wilson held her legs down and raped her she said.

Security video from the bar shows the two leaving hand-in-hand, then returning separately roughly 15 minutes later. The victim is on her phone, calling her cousin who soon comes outside to find her. Once the victim reaches the bar, Wilson turns around and runs away toward his house.

Wilson, who testified in his own defense, said the encounter in the bar was consensual and that the girl was kissing and touching his body as well.

Contrary to the girl’s account, Wilson testified that they did not have intercourse at his home. He said they were “getting ready” to when he got a text and call from his friend and decided to go back to the bar instead, which seemed to make the girl mad. He also testified that the girl wasn’t drunk.

Wilson’s appointed attorney, Forrest Lowry, argued there was no evidence that the two had intercourse at Wilson’s home and that the sexual activity they did engage in was consensual.

“There was no signed statement,” Lowry said. “… By everything she did, according to Albert, she indicated that sex was what she wanted.”

While forensic testing found no seminal fluid on the girl’s clothing or vaginal swab, that doesn’t necessarily mean sexual intercourse did not occur, KBI technicians testified.

Photos from the sexual assault exam the girl got at a hospital the next day corroborated her account that Wilson held her legs down while he raped her on his bed, the state emphasized.

“She’s got two bruises right where she said he had his hands, in the approximate size and shape of thumbs,” McGowan said. “You can look at the pictures.”

McGowan also argued that Wilson’s explanation for why the girl might have accused him of rape — because she was angry he denied her sex — made no sense.

McGowan also presented witnesses to corroborate the girl’s emotional devastation after the event, including her mother and a forensic psychologist who diagnosed her with PTSD persisting even a year and a half later.

Wilson is black, and the girl is white. The jury that convicted Wilson was all white, and mostly women.

Wilson’s attorney mentioned race when disputing that being raped triggered the girl’s emotional problems. Lowry said jurors could only speculate about why the girl “cried rape” and ended up with PTSD.

“She’s a young girl going to a private Catholic all-girls school; she may have thought that she had gone too far with a strange man. I don’t know if race has anything to do with it; it may have,” Lowry said. “You don’t know, and you will probably never know.”

Wilson was free on bond throughout his trial, but he was taken into custody upon conviction and remains in jail awaiting sentencing.

photo by: Sara Shepherd