A Pottsville man left Schuylkill County Court victorious on Monday after a jury acquitted him of four charges stemming from an alleged assault in August 2015 against a city woman.
Ernest A. Rosemond, 38, smiled after the jury of seven men and five women deliberated a little more than an hour before finding him not guilty of involuntary deviate sexual intercourse, sexual assault and indecent assault.
The verdict ended a one-day trial over which President Judge William E. Baldwin presided.
Pottsville police had charged Rosemond with forcing a woman to have sex with him on Aug. 18, 2015.
“He told me to lay my head on his chest. He grabbed the back of my neck and pushed my head down,” the woman testified.
“Did it hurt?” Deputy Assistant District Attorney Robert I. Lipkin asked.
“Yes,” she answered.
“Did you tell him you didn’t want to do it?”
“Yes.”
“More than once?”
“Yes.”
The woman testified she did not immediately call police because she was scared of Rosemond, who would have heard her trying to make a telephone call.
“I wanted to do something. I couldn’t,” she said.
Furthermore, she said, Rosemond threatened to kill her and also told her no one would believe her because she was a drug user.
When cross-examined by Rosemond, who represented himself, the woman wept when she tried to explain what the defendant termed contradictions in her story.
“I was petrified that day,” she said. “The times that day are totally irrelevant to me.”
Pottsville police Cpl. Joseph R. Welsh testified he interviewed the woman and taped a statement from her. He said he had found nothing during the investigation that would contradict the woman’s story, and that Rosemond told him nothing of any evidentiary value when questioned.
In his testimony, Rosemond said the woman later apologized to him.
“She pled her case to me,” he said.
He also denied ever hitting the woman.
In his closing argument, Lipkin said Rosemond was trying to raise irrelevant issues. He said the key was the woman herself, who was not trying to deceive jurors.
“Did that woman’s testimony sound like she was sorry she reported this to the police?” Lipkin asked. He said that if she had regretted reporting the incident, she would have gone back to the police and recanted her story.
Furthermore, the woman had no reason to lie, Lipkin said.
“It took a whole lot ... for that woman to get up on that witness stand and bare her soul,” he said.
However, jurors accepted Rosemond’s argument that the woman was not truthful.
“Do you feel today her inconsistencies ... have established credibility?” Rosemond asked. “Some of her testimony doesn’t make sense.”
Defendant: Ernest A. Rosemond
Age: 38
Residence: Pottsville
Verdict: Not guilty of involuntary deviate sexual intercourse, sexual assault and indecent assault