(Mission) A Kansas woman who alleges consensual sex with a friend in her college dorm turned into a terrifying assault took matters into her own hands when prosecutors refused to lay rape charges. She called a grand jury of citizens, drawing on a 134-year-old state law.
Posted on May 25, 2021 at 7:44 a.m.
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Madison Smith, 22, collected the hundreds of signatures needed to form the grand jury after the county prosecutor resolved the case by allowing Jared Stolzenburg to plead guilty to aggravated assault and receive probation from two years.
Mme Smith, who graduated earlier this month from Bethany College in Lindsborg, north Wichita, is part of a generation of women being encouraged to go public with their assaults in the wake of the #metoo movement.
“It’s happening all over the country, all over the world, (the stories) of victims and survivors are being played down by prosecutors who don’t believe them,” she said. “And that’s not correct because the rape culture is pervasive, we have to get rid of it, and one of the ways to do that is to get our stories out there. ”
Kansas is one of six states that allow citizens to request a grand jury. The 1887 law was rarely used until anti-abortion activists began to do so to force grand jury inquiries into abortion clinics. It has since been used to attack adult bookstores and to challenge the right of former Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach to run as a Republican candidate for governor.
But the case of Mme Smith, who will be reviewed in September, is considered the first time someone claiming to be a victim of sexual assault has used it, said Kathy Ray of the Kansas Coalition Against Sexual and Domestic Violence.
The process of finding a grand jury was not easy. Mme Smith had to stand in a parking lot telling his story to strangers in order to collect hundreds of signatures, then start over when the first petition was rejected for technical reasons.
Some of the strangers she approached snatched the pen from her hands just minutes after she had started talking, hugging her and whispering in her ear so others nearby couldn’t hear her. ‘they had themselves been sexually assaulted in the past.
“They were very grateful that I was fighting, that I was just fighting the justice system and trying to make a change in the world, because they were too scared to fight,” she recalls.
Butme Smith believes this is the only way to get justice for the alleged February 2018 attack.
McPherson County District Attorney Gregory Benefiel explained to M’s motherme Smith in a recorded conversation that the case was complicated because Mr.me Smith did not verbally withdraw his consent during the meeting. Mme Smith pointed out that it was because he was suffocating her.
“I think anyone can realize that if you can’t breathe, you can’t speak,” she said.
Mme Smith said the attack happened after she ran into Jared Stolzenburg while doing laundry and returned to her room at Bethany College, where they had had sex. It was initially consensual, but then he started slapping and strangling her, making it difficult for her to breathe, said Mme Smith at Jared Stolzenburg’s sentencing hearing in August 2020.
“I really thought he was going to kill me, and the only way I was going to leave the room was in a body bag,” M said.me Smith.
“He was choking me for 20 or 30 seconds at a time and I was starting to pass out,” she said.
Jared Stolzenburg does not have a phone number listed and did not immediately respond to a message on Facebook.
Prosecutor Benefiel said in an interview with The Associated Press that sex crimes are “extremely difficult to prosecute” because jurors seek “this type of evidence at the ‘CSI'”. He said he could not comment on the details of this case, but added that he believed Mr.me He and Smith both wanted the same thing: “truth and justice.”
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