Trial gets underway in WCU rape case

Prosecution not allowed to present testimony about reported scuffle

WEST CHESTER >> The prosecution will not be allowed to present testimony about a shoving match that occurred between a Gettysburg man and partygoers at a fraternity house at West Chester University prior to an alleged rape the man is accused of committing, a Common Pleas judge has ruled.

The jury in the trial of Mauricio Sanjuan-Martinez, 21, was seated in Judge Anthony Sarcione’s courtroom at the Chester County Justice Center Tuesday,

with opening statements by the prosecution and defense.

The victim, who was a WCU student at the time of the reported assault, is expected to take the stand and testify today. The two sides expected the testimony in the case to last through the week and possibly into next week.

Sanjuan-Martinez was arrested by West Chester police in April and charged with rape by forcible compulsion, rape of an unconscious victim, sexual assault, aggravated indecent assault, and indecent assault for the alleged incident that occurred in the morning hours of March 29.

Sanjuan-Martinez, who at the time was a member of the Kappa Delta Rho fraternity, has denied that he forced himself of the woman. His attorneys have argued that whatever took place between their client and the woman was consensual,

although a matter of mistaken identity.

The prosecution, led by First Assistant District Attorney Michael Noone and Assistant District Attorney Brian Burack, had hoped to present testimony about Sanjuan-Martinez’s behavior in the hours prior to the alleged attack. Specifically, about an encounter between Sanjuan-Martinez, his date, and another man sometime prior to the alleged attack.

According to statements from both sides at a pretrial hearing held Thursday, Sanjuan-Martinez and his date, identified as Elizabeth Lubash, were dancing in the basement of the Kappa Delta Rho house in the 600 block of South Walnut Street. At some point, she “brushed him off,” and he allegedly became upset. Later that evening, the prosecutors contend he approached Lubash and another man and “knocked them over.”

Burack last week had argued that the episode would show the way in which Sanjuan-Martinez’s actions progressed during the evening,

eventually leading to the alleged assault.

But defense attorneys Peter Kratsa and Caroline Donato, of the West Chester firm of MacElree Harvey, told Sarcione that the information would amount to improper “character testimony,” in which the prosecutions as attempting to make their client appear as a “sex-starved predator.”

Sarcione, in a ruling handed down on Friday, prohibited any testimony about the shoving match.

“The commonwealth has failed to establish a sufficient nexus between the defendant’s alleged act of pushing two unrelated people to the ground earlier in the night and then allegedly committing rape upon the victim later,” the judge wrote in his order. He said the theory that he had attacked the victim because he was upset with his date “is speculative at best,” and would prejudice the jury against Sanjuan-Martinez.

According to a criminal complaint filed by West Chester Detective Stan Billie, the alleged victim,

whose name was not used in the complaint, contacted police around 4 a.m. on March 29.

She said that she and her boyfriend had attended a “Date Party” at the Kappa Delta Rho house in the 600 block of South Walnut Street the previous day. They arrived around 11 p.m., after they had already begun drinking. At some point they were together on a sofa, and she fell asleep. “The next thing she found herself in the first-floor bathroom leaning over a toilet,” according to the complaint. “(She) said a subject entered the bathroom … (and) said something to her at which time she realized it wasn’t her boyfriend.”

She said the man, later identified as Sanjuan-Martinez, approached her from behind and began to have sex with her. She screamed, and he put his hand over her mouth, she said. She was able to break away and leave the bathroom.

Sanjuan-Martinez, who was 20 at the time of his arrest, has been free on bail awaiting trial.