Military Justice A North Texas woman turned to the Marines when the Tarrant County D.A. wouldn’t take her sex assault case. By DAN MALONE The woman mistakenly believed that 
If the military could win a conviction, ‘there’s no reason a seasoned prosecutor couldn’t do it,’ the teacher said.
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everyone understands the rules these days — that “stop” really does mean “stop,” that what you may have been doing a minute before you said no doesn’t matter, and that consent for the most intimate physical connection between two people can be withdrawn at any time. So after her boyfriend forced himself upon her late one night in his apartment near Hulen Mall, the woman said, she was stunned to learn that he wasn’t the only one who didn’t get it. Tarrant County prosecutors declined to present the woman’s case to a grand jury because of what they characterized as insufficient evidence. When the district attorney declined to seek an indictment, the woman contacted her boyfriend’s employer — the U.S. Marines. And based on the same facts the woman presented to Fort Worth police and Tarrant County prosecutors, a Naval Criminal Investigations Service agent built a case that resulted in her boyfriend, former Staff Sgt. Johnny Odell Bice, being court-martialed, convicted of forcible sodomy, and sentenced to 22 months behind bars. And while the woman, a North Texas school teacher in her 30s, said she understands that sexual assault cases can be difficult to prove, she doesn’t understand why the military could successfully prosecute a case that the district attorney would not. “If the military could do it, there’s no reason a seasoned prosecutor couldn’t do it,’’ she said. Her anger with the criminal justice system, however, goes beyond her problems with Tarrant County. After Bice, now 31, completed his sentence, he was indicted by a grand jury in Odessa on a charge of failing to register as a sex offender, officials there said. This time, the Ector County district attorney dismissed the case. “I am completely disgusted with the fact that they let him walk,’’ the woman said. “The law is designed to put people like him back in prison.’’ Today, Bice, who has since registered as a sex offender, is living in a Midland apartment, according to the Texas Department of Public Safety. He did not reply to a letter sent seeking comment, nor did he or his attorney respond to phone messages left at the attorney’s office. During his court martial, Bice testified that he never intended to hurt the teacher and thought she was enjoying herself until he heard her gasp an “ouch.’’ The story is one that would have likely never occurred, or ever been publicly told, were it not for the internet. The pair met in cyberspace, and the woman told her story, albeit anonymously, on a web site that opposes Tarrant County District Attorney Tim Curry (www.mrtimcurry.com). Fort Worth Weekly contacted the teacher through the site’s operator, and she spoke on the condition that she would not be identified. The teacher said she and Bice, who was separated from his wife, had a brief affair after their first face-to-face meeting at Uncle Julio’s in the early spring of 2002. They experienced “some pretty instant chemistry,’’ she testified during the court martial. In the wee hours of a Saturday morning, the teacher and Bice arranged by e-mail to hook up. According to her report to police, the pair engaged in several sexual acts before he told her he was going to enter her anally. When she told him she wasn’t interested, she said, he pushed her flat on her stomach on his bed and forced himself into her. She screamed and cried. He put his left hand over her mouth. He pulled her hair. “Get off of me,’’ she yelled over and over. She tried to push up from the bed, but lacked the strength. When he stopped, he said, “Jesus Christ, what’s wrong with you?” She told him, “When someone tells you no, it f—ing means no.’’ She told police that she had been assaulted. They took her statement and Bice’s and sent the case to the district attorney. Tarrant County prosecutors said it appeared to be a hard-to-sort-out, he-said/she-said case. “According to both of them, she specifically went over to Bice’s home for the purpose of having sex,’’ said Senior Staff Attorney David Montague. Their stories diverged on the key issue of whether the anal intercourse was consensual. Further, the case came to the DA without a recommendation from police on how it should be handled. “It was reviewed by an intake attorney, and that attorney rejected it for prosecution, and that was the end of it for us,’’ Montague said. That decision could have been appealed but apparently was not, he said. Frustrated by the prosecutors’ response. the teacher complained to military officials — and they took the case. Bice was court-martialed in February 2003. “He grabbed the back of my hair and was pulling it so hard I could feel my hair ripping out of my head,’’ the teacher said, according to a transcript of that proceeding. The assault, she said, lasted several minutes. “I felt like I was being ripped in half.’’ Bice, however, testified that everything he and the teacher did was consensual. “She never said or did anything to make me think that she didn’t want to do this, so I continued.’’ Only when she gasped in pain did he quit. “After I realized I hurt her or something, I tried to make sure she was OK, and she got upset and left. “I never meant to hurt her,’’ he testified. “I never wanted to do that.’’ The military judge found Bice not guilty of vaginally raping the woman but convicted him of committing sodomy by force. John D. Cramer, the Tarrant County prosecutor who initially handled the case, said requirements for trying a case under military disciplinary code and state law are not the same. “It is not unusual for different agencies to reach what appears to be conflicting results,’’ he said. It was not immediately clear if Bice appealed his conviction or how much time he spent locked up. But when he was released, he resettled in West Texas, where officials said he was indicted earlier this year on a charge of failing to register as a sex offender. That case, however, was dismissed. “He attempted to register up in the Panhandle and was told he didn’t have the proper paperwork,’’ Ector County District Attorney John Smith said. “This fellow attempted to follow the law.’’ The teacher’s husband, a North Texas attorney familiar with how criminal cases play out, said Smith’s explanation for dismissing the case sounded all too common: “He tried — which is what every defendant says when he fails to register.’’ Since the assault, the teacher’s been training as an advocate for sexual assault victims at a North Texas women’s center. And she hopes her story might help others understand that any unwanted sexual contact is an assault. “No means no,’’ she said. “If you’re not willing to abide by that, it’s a crime.’’ Muffle the Scream: Part I Reviving Victims Rights in Richmond By Dana Logan It was three am. July 16. Three years and a month ago. I woke up with a man stand-ing over my bed; his hand on my mouth. It was there to muffle the scream that was sure to come. A scream that did come, but was futile. It was not heard by my then-sleep-ing roommate, my upstairs neighbors—I’m not even entirely sure that I heard it myself. But what supplemented the scream was much more effective. My left foot, by pure survival instinct, was firmly planted in the center of the intruder’s body. I kicked. Hard enough that he was no longer standing over me. Hard enough that, as I stood up out of bed, my attacker was a full three or four feet away. It was only then that my hand reached to my chest, then, pulled back. My fingers tight around something foreign. My hand, now in front of me, opened, revealing a knife, slick with my own blood—blood now spilling from a hole in my chest. With his weapon in my hand and with no doubt that I would fight back, the man turned to leave. He ran out of my bedroom and continued through the front door. Following close behind him, to make sure he left and the threat of further attack was gone, I locked the door, then made my way to the phone. Dialing the number we all know by heart, I was already thinking about the next step, and for the first time, it occurred to me that I was in pain. Cordless phone in hand, I went to the bathroom, grabbed a towel, placed it over the wound and applied pressure. Now I was calling out for my roommate, still asleep at the other end of our long apart-ment. When she awoke to my banging on her locked bedroom door, panic washed over her still groggy face. But by then, there wasnothing left to do except wait—for the am-bulance, en route, for the doctors to mend my deep wound, and for some sense to be made of all this. The police arrived quickly. Four and a half minutes after my phone call. Five min-utes too late to catch the intruder. The short trip, from my apartment in the fan to MCV, took longer than you can imagine, but was made bearable by two EMTs that reassured me and even made me smile. At the trauma center, I was poked and prodded. Ultrasounds. Rape kits. X-rays. The works. And still, they couldn’t tell what kind of damage had been done. They needed a better look. Not even fully comprehending what that would mean, but also not really caring, so long as they fixed me, I signed papers to let by the time I reached the operating room, the doctors had decided to do a laparoscopy first. The camera, which they inserted through a small incision above my belly button, showed very little dam-age. The knife, which had pen-etrated four and a half to five inches deep, had missed my heart by a quarter of an inch, snuck by my lungs, and just barely nicked my liver. With no need now to open my chest for repairs, the surgeons irrigated my liver to get the blood out, stitched me up, and sent me to recovery. Recovery. Physically, it was only a couple weeks before my skin was replaced with scar tissue and my stitches dissi-pated. And while it was, at times, excruciating, it was nothing compared to the mental, emotional and psychological healing that would consume me for months to come. …continued next week
Muffle the Scream: Part II Reviving Victims Rights in Richmond By Dana Logan them open my chest completely. Luckily, how-ever,
They say he was trying to rape me. And if I’d seen the knife, maybe he would have succeeded. Maybe I would have lain there, frozen with fear. But I didn’t see it. At least, not until after I’d kicked him off of me. By the time I noticed his weapon, it was sunk deep into my chest. So instead of becoming a victim of rape that night, I became the victim of stabbing. It’s hard not to play if the knife had penetrated a mere quarter of an inch to the left? What if I hadn’t been able to fight? What if I’d bled to death in my own bed? But sometimes I wonder: if the attack had resulted in my death, would I have been treated with more respect in the aftermath? Respect. Kindness. Compassion. Common courtesies we expect of one another in day-to-day life. And yet, at a time when these considerations are perhaps most needed, they seem far from the minds of those in a position to grant them in the most meaningful ways. While there were those willing to help however possible, many of the police offic-ers involved in my case showed little in the way of sympathy. Only minutes after my roommate was awakened, still shocked and puzzled as to what had taken place, the responding police officers had her helping them search my blood-stained bedroom for the handle of the knife, which had come apart when it dropped from my hand. Hours later, as I lay in the hospital recov-ering from surgery, groggy from a combina-tion of anesthesia and morphine, one detec-tive implied that I used recreational drugs, and, despite the presence of my parents, what if. Whatbegan asking probing questions about my dating history. Back at the crime scene (my apartment), officers were able to secure DNA evidence from my attacker. The detective’s assurance that it would be processed in a few weeks missed the mark by four months. Repeated attempts to inquire about my case were met with coldness, excuses, and most often, unreturned calls. One officer ac-tually said that if I were famous – "like Shandra Levi" – I wouldn’t have to wait so long. And all that time the would-be rapist ran free while I continued to feel imprisoned in my own apartment, my own city, my own head. While I do understand that these officers have very difficult jobs, I believe that it is pos-sible— and necessary—to do them while keep-ing in mind the trauma that a victim has so recently endured, and showing due respect. Thanks to victim advocacy groups, every state now guarantees certain victim rights, including: • The right to be treated with dignity and compassion. • The right to protection from intimidation and further harm. • The right to be informed about the case’s progress through the criminal justice system, including notice of a plea bargain. • The right to receive compensa-tion for damages. • The right to equal treatment in court. Even with these changes, every day victims are left to deal, not only with trauma as a result of crime, but also with a feeling of helplessness within a system that is supposed to work on their behalf. I recognize the hurdles Richmond’s police officers face in their struggle to curb crime, but I speak out as a reminder that one of their responsibilities is to treat victims of crime with respect and decency in their hour of direst need. Dana Logan graduated from VCU with degrees in Religious Studies and Psychology. She is the managing editor of City Edition.
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