Lawsuit Spells Out 'Nightmare' For California Man Accused Without Evidence
The accusation
On Jan. 19, 2013, nearly a year after that bus trip, Hounsell became executive director of the Los Angeles County GOP. A week later, on Jan. 27, an accusation was made that he had been sending inappropriate Facebook messages to an underage girl.
Doe's fellow students had made the accusation anonymously after Doe supposedly left her computer open in public on Facebook. They took screen shots of messages containing graphic language, obtained by the Examiner, and handed them over to school authorities.
When the police came to the school on Feb. 1, Doe claimed Hounsell had tickled her ribs and started sending her explicit messages sometime after the bus trip. Doe told police that she had replied because she thought it was harmless and never planned to meet him again in person.
A month after the first police interview, Doe was brought in for a recorded interview with two detectives from the Internet Crimes Against Children task force. This time, Doe told the officers that Hounsell had tickled her leg several times while he was "having a conversation with somebody else."
Doe also reiterated that at no time did she or Hounsell ever agree to meet. She gave officers access to her Facebook account. Even though she had deactivated and reactivated the account, the messages should still have been there.
No evidence of messages
On Mar. 25, 2013, ICAC officers logged on to Doe's Facebook profile but were "unable to locate any sexual [sic] explicit chat between her and the suspect," according to a police report. The officer did find that Hounsell was on her friends list.
A week later, on April 5, Officer Eric Good talked to Hounsell. The police report says he told Hounsell that messages existed between him and Doe. The police report made it seem like Hounsell may have admitted the crime was possible.
I [ICAC Officer Eric Good] advised Hounsell that I had chat logs where he stated that he knew that the victim was under the age of 18 and Hounsell advised me that he did not remember that chat. Hounsell stated that during the time he was chatting with [Jane Doe], he was having marital problems. Hounsell stated that he would begin drinking alcohol while he was at home. After having a few drinks he would log into his Facebook profile and contact some of his female friends and attempt to engage them in sexually explicit chat.
Hounsell told the Examiner that the police report did not accurately reflect his statements, and that his talk of drinking and messaging female friends referred to years earlier when he was still single. Hounsell further said that the only conversations he had with Doe were strictly professional, done over his work email address and only pertained to a few questions she had about charter schools and government.
Hounsell also says he offered Officer Good his Facebook login to check for the explicit messages. Good did not take him up on the offer.
The arrest
On July 1, 2013, a Democratic former assemblyman named Mike Feuer became L.A. City Attorney. When the Los Angeles County District Attorney declined to press charges against Hounsell on July 30, Feuer seized the case. Officer Good contacted Hounsell again to find out his attorney's information. Members of the press began calling Hounsell, his family and his employer to discuss charges Hounsell wasn't even aware of yet.
The media circus that ensued — complete with news cameras camping outside his family home for days — made Hounsell believe this was in part motivated by political harassment. "The City originally wanted to take me into custody at my house, where the press was heading," he said. "When I showed up downtown to turn myself in, it sent everyone for a scramble, and they couldn't get cameras there in time."
By the time Hounsell was bailed out of jail seven hours later (he spent six of them waiting to be given access to a working telephone) and recovered his cell phone, it had been inundated with Google Alerts for his own name.
Hounsell was charged with two counts of trying to seduce a minor. He would only learn after a lengthy, humiliating investigation that police had no evidence — and in fact never would obtain any evidence — that the Facebook messages in question had ever really existed.
Read the full story: www.washingtonexaminer.com
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