Emotions flare during ex-police officer Randle’s rape trial

Emotions exploded Tuesday in Shelby County Criminal Court during the cross-examination of a woman accusing former Memphis Police Department Officer Bridges Randle of rape.

Deputies physically restrained a young woman who began shouting at Randle as her mother broke down sobbing on the witness stand under a withering cross-examination by defense attorney Leslie Ballin.

“This is so wrong,” the woman, 41, said at one point as Ballin vied to pick apart her story.

The Commercial Appeal does not identify victims of sexual assault.

Randle, 43, is charged with aggravated rape for an alleged on-the-job attack of a crime victim in June 2000. He is accused of raping the then-23-year-old woman at gunpoint after she’d called police to report her car was vandalized. Investigators initially made no arrests and the case remained cold for 14 years until the woman’s rape kit finally was tested in 2014 and DNA evidence identified Randle as the suspect. He denies the allegations. In opening statements Tuesday, Ballin maintained the two had consensual sex. The lawyer contends the woman enticed Randle when he returned to her apartment after two other officers had left.

“Did you invite him back?” Ballin asked the woman in one exchange.

“I did not invite him back except to take picture of my (damaged) car,” she answered.

The woman testified she first called police that night after her boyfriend began bashing the back of her new car with a baseball bat. The woman said Randle returned to scene after two other officers had left under the pretext of documenting the extent of the vandalism to her car. Instead, he took her into a back room as her 2-year-old daughter slept on the sofa and raped her, she said.

In one testy exchange, Ballin asserted that the woman wanted police to evict her boyfriend.

The lawyer seemed to imply that the woman cried that night because of the loss of her boyfriend. The woman offered a quick retort, telling Ballin her turmoil that night involved “your client raping me.”

It’s unclear whether jurors will hear evidence involving a second, unrelated but similar case. Randle pleaded guilty in 2004 to official oppression and served a year probation after another female crime victim said she’d been sexually assaulted.

Testimony in the case before Judge W. Mark Ward is expected to resume Wednesday.