Man enters guilty plea in rape case

A man accused of drugging a friend’s drink and then sexually assaulting her while she was unconscious pleads guilty.

WEST CHESTER » A New Garden man accused of drugging a female friend’s drink while she was visiting him and his girlfriend and then sexually assaulting her while she was unconscious pleaded guilty to criminal charges in Chester County Common Pleas Court a day before a jury was to be selected in his case.

Defendant John Wesley Harris entered an open plea to one count of indecent assault, a first-degree misdemeanor, on Monday afternoon, following a day of legal wrangling between the prosecution and defense over whether a forensic expert could testify about whether the woman had been given a “date rape” drug.

In exchange for the guilty plea, the prosecution withdrew charges of rape of an unconscious person, involuntary deviate sexual intercourse, sexual assault, and aggravated indecent assault against Harris, a 29-year-old who had been arrested in October 2018, four months after the incident occurred at his apartment outside Kennett Square.

The charge carries with it a possible maximum sentence of 2½ to five years in state prison, although Harris will likely not face that full term in jail. A sentencing date will be set in the future after the Sexual Offender’s Assessment Board completes a review of his case.

The victim, who had been friends with both Harris and his then-girlfriend, now wife, was in Judge David Bortner’s courtroom for the plea Monday.

Chief Deputy District Attorney Andrea Cardamone said that the woman had been advised of the decision to allow Harris to plead guilty to the lesser charges of indecent assault and that while she was reluctant to approve it, she nevertheless had.

The crime of indent assault occurs when someone has contact with another person for sexual arousal, without that person’s consent. In Harris’ case, it includes the assertion that he did so while the woman was unconscious.

A jury panel had been called to the Justice Center on Monday to begin hearing Harris’ case that day, but was dismissed for the day after a dispute arose over evidence that Cardamone and co-counsel Assistant District Attorney Nichole Kratzer wanted to introduce to buttress their contention that the woman had been drugged.

Defense attorney Sam Stretton of West Chester told Bortner that the prosecution’s toxicology expert, Richard Cohn of the DrugScan lab in Bucks County, should not be permitted to testify about what affects the “club drugs” GHB and Rohypnol would have on a person, since he was not qualified to do so.

Stretton also argued that toxicology tests done after the incident had shown no presence of the substances, and that the notion that Harris had slipped the woman a “date rape” drug flew in the face of the prosecution’s initial case — that the woman had passed out after drinking to much wine and that Harris had then taken advantage of her.

Stretton maintained that the sex between the two was consensual, and that the woman had reported an assault after becoming embarrassed at having had sex with her friend after getting drunk.

But Cardamone said that Cohn had considered the circumstances surrounding the incident an “almost textbook” example of a “date rape,” in which the victim loses consciousness after drinking only a minimum amount of alcohol, vomits profusely, and cannot recall what happened the next morning.

The absence of traces of the “date rape” drugs in the woman’s system when she was examined several hours after leaving Harris’ home would be explained because the substances are easily washed from a person’s blood in a few hours after they are administered, Cardamone said.

She said the woman had consistently told those police and medical personnel she encountered that, “I think I was drugged.” She said she never felt intoxicated the night of the incident, but remembered projectile vomiting after passing out.

According to the criminal complaint in the case, the woman, whose name was not included in the criminal complaint, had spent the night at the apartment Harris shared with his girlfriend, Bayless Crkvenac, on June 2. The trio had been drinking wine and playing drinking games, when she decided to stop drinking because she had to drive home. But Harris, she told police from the Southern Chester County Regional Police Department, convinced her to stay over.

She said at some point she passed out, and woke up the following morning with “a feeling of terror,” according to the complaint by Detective Stephen Madonna. Her clothing was off, and she recalled vomiting into a “pasta pot” and hearing Harris tell her he “wanted to get with (her),” while he was undressed.

When she contacted Harris the next morning and asked what happened, he suggested that she had decided to sleep in the nude because he and Crkvenac did so. “Haha,” he wrote. “We were all really drunk.”

The hospital examination, however, revealed information that suggested she had been sexually assaulted. The tests found DNA on her that was later matched positively with with Harris.

The woman told police that after the incident, she checked social media and saw that the couch in Harris’s apartment where she fell asleep had been replaced in the apartment.

No date has been set for the sentencing.