Retrial in 2015 attack results in conviction

Jury deliberates for four hours in rape verdict

A sexual predator who served 18 years in prison for a 1984 rape and burglary was convicted at a retrial of attacking another victim in Colonie in 2015.

An Albany County jury deliberated for about four hours Thursday before convicting Harold Jackson, 56, of first-degree rape and criminal sex act for his attack on the victim, who at the time was 18, on First Street.

Special prosecutor Alaina Finan, a Latham attorney who tried the case, said she would ask acting Supreme Court Justice Roger McDonough to sentence Jackson as a persistent violent felon, which could lead to a life sentence.

Jackson — who has prior felony convictions for rape and burglary, attempted robbery and selling drugs — had been serving a sentence of 50 years to life in prison in maximum-security Great Meadow Correctional Facility in Washington County after he was convicted at trial in 2016.

Finan, a former Rensselaer County prosecutor, said it was a tough case because a key witness, the sexual assault nurse examiner, had left the area and could not be reached. Her testimony from the first trial was read into evidence, she said.

“It had its challenges for sure but I’m ultimately ecstatic that the jury found how they found and that the impediments to this didn’t prevent them from making that finding,” Finan said.

In October 2019, appellate justices in Albany reversed Jackson’s conviction due to a technicality during jury selection. The Appellate Division of state Supreme Court’s Third Department ruled that since-retired state Supreme Court Justice Thomas Breslin wrongly forced Jackson’s lawyer to use two peremptory challenges to dismiss two potential jurors from sitting on the trial.

One of the jurors, when asked if Jackson’s trial was the right case to sit on, replied: “I’m not sure.

I teach youth. I have five children. That’s where my sympathy would lie ... (the) victim was probably about 20 years old. I would have a tendency to be biased in that direction.”

Asked if it could make it difficult to weigh the evidence, the juror said she believed she could remain unbiased, adding: “I do lean toward sympathy with the youth. That’s where my life is.”

The second juror had said he was having a difficult time with the subject matter of the trial because he has four younger sisters and a daughter. When asked if he could get beyond the charges and weigh the evidence, he said: “I’d like to say I could be impartial, but until everything comes out it’s difficult to say.”

The appellate court later said: “As neither prospective juror unequivocally stated that he or she could be impartial, the court should have posed questions to rehabilitate them by obtaining such assurances or, if rehabilitation was not possible, excused the prospective juror.”

Sentencing is March 25.