Former prep school student Owen Labrie was acquitted last year of felony rape but convicted on other charges brought against him by a 15-year-old classmate at New Hampshire’s elite St. Paul’s School.
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In a court filing earlier this week, Labrie’s lawyer asked for a new trial, arguing his defense team at the time failed to properly challenge a computer charge Labrie was eventually convicted of.
Labrie, 20, of Turnbridge, Vt., was convicted of prohibited use of a computer, sexual assault and endangering the welfare of a child at the prep school. This video was licensed from Grab Networks.
The motion he filed yesterday argues that his trial attorneys didn’t “put enough effort into fighting a computer-related felony that landed [Labrie] on the sex offender registry for life”.
Labrie is now serving his one-year sentence at the Merrimack County Jail.
She added: “This rationale and understanding was fundamentally flawed”. She wrote it was likely that the girl’s Facebook exchanges “would have contained information which may have been used to challenge her credibility regarding her allegations of a forcible rape occurring”.
Earlier this week, Labrie filed a motion for a new trial based on ineffective assistance of counsel.
In a statement, Carney declined to discuss the motion in detail, but said that he agrees “completely” that the computer law “should not be applied to Owen Labrie given the evidence at trial and the jury’s verdict”.
He said ultimately it is a policy interpretation for the New Hampshire Supreme Court.
He was 18 at the time of the encounter in a near-deserted building on campus.
Labrie was arrested in 2014 days after graduation. Prosecutors linked the assault on the girl to a competition at St. Paul’s known as the Senior Salute in which some seniors seek to have sex with underclassmen.
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Labrie had been out on bail following his conviction pending an appeal, but that bail was revoked last month after a judge found that he had violated his court-ordered curfew.
