A Note to the Reader:
This is a recap of an ongoing trial. All quotes are as best as I can scribble ’em (the feds take your phone at security). Fact checks and official transcription corrections to come.
The trial of former Indian Health Services (IHS) pediatrician Stanley Patrick Weber for child sexual assault began today in the Great Falls, Montana federal courthouse. Weber is charged with raping two boys while he worked on the Blackfeet Reservation IHS in Browning, Montana, from 1993 to 1995. Weber is facing separate charges of child sexual assault from his time at the Pine Ridge Reservation IHS in South Dakota, where he worked as a pediatrician and acting clinical director until 2016.
This is a few brief notes on Day 1 of the trial and comes with a WARNING: Some of the information is quite graphic.
Jury Selection and the Odd Duck Defense
From a pool of more than 50 potential jurors, 13 (12 jurors and one alternate) were chosen. In questioning potential jurors, defense counsel Harvey Steinberg hinted at the coming strategy.
He repeatedly referenced people who are an “odd duck” in society, and who perhaps “march to the beat of a different drummer,” and asked jurors whether they could see how people like that might be wrongly accused of a crime, simply for being different.
He referenced the long period of time — roughly 25 years — between the alleged crimes and the investigation and charges. And he listed things that could impair someone’s memory over those years. “Drugs, alcohol, jail,” he offered to a potential juror, who agreed that those things could affect someone’s memory.
When asked, a large number of potential jurors referenced having been affected, second-hand, by sexual assault crimes and accusations. A former brother-in-law and a (separate) former son-in-law accused of child sexual abuse. Friends who were abused as children, and not believed when they told adults. Friends and colleagues who were charged with statutory. By and large, these folks were not chosen for the jury.
Victim 1 Testimony
The only person to testify after jury selection was an alleged victim — his name is public record, but I’d just assume not put it in print. He arrived in court wearing a black-and-white Cascade County Detention uniform with shackles on his ankles. Born in Canada, a member of the Blackfeet tribe (which has a reservation in Northern Montana and reserves in Canada), the 35-year-old victim moved to Browning with his mother when he was 10 years old, after his parents divorced.
His mother was a drinker, he told lead prosecutor Lori Suek, and Family Services placed him in a group home called the Nurturing Center. At the Browning hospital and at the Nurturing Center, he said, he saw Dr. Weber for checkups, and during those checkups, “he touched me.”
Pressed for details about where Weber touched him, the alleged victim opted for the geographical definition of where: the hospital, he said. In a room by the front door of the nurturing center, off to the left “with one of those beds, I guess you call them, that have the white paper on them.”
When prosecutor Suek asked where on his body Weber touched him, the alleged victim took a long pause and deep breaths, looking away from Suek, struggling to find words. “My legs, my chest, my face,” he eventually said. Two people left the courtroom gallery, one of them sobbing.
“Did he kiss you?” the prosecutor asked.
“Yeah,” he replied after another pause.
On further questioning, the alleged victim said that Weber touched his (the victim’s) penis and put it in his mouth; he remembered Weber grabbing a Kleenex from the examining room to ejaculate into after putting his penis into the victim’s mouth. He also recounted an instance where, he said, Weber had him lay down on an examining table and Weber “tried to have sex with me…touching my butt,” but stopped because it was painful for the victim and he told Weber he didn’t want to.
“I was ashamed,” the victim said, when asked why he never told anyone about the alleged incidents until 2016, when a federal investigator interviewed him about it.
During cross-examination, defense attorney Steinberg followed up on this point. Why had he never told anyone? Never accidentally let it slip to someone on some night he’d had too much to drink? Why — during any of the numerous times when court and prison counselors had asked him if he had ever been abused — had he not told anyone?
“I don’t wanna talk about being molested,” the alleged victim said, his voice rising. “I don’t wanna talk about that. I don’t wanna volunteer information…Even when I leave here, I’ll still say no.”
During testimony and cross examination, the alleged victim talked about his troubled and often violent life. Currently serving 17 years for bank robbery, convicted of kidnapping, reckless endangerment, and other crimes; placed in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania federal penitentiary, a special place for “people with a lot of violence.” Taken from his mother by Family Services, refusing to believe that his father had died, “the weight on my shoulders, being the oldest” when he finally did accept it. A member of the Crips at age 11. A regular user of drugs and alcohol at that same age. Recently diagnosed as schizophrenic, he said, and taking medication for it. Seeing visions of “bugs, dead people, my [kidnapping] victim.”
Defense counsel Steinberg asked if he had only come to these stories as a way to curry favor with prosecutors, perhaps reduce the 13 years he has left on his sentence.
“No,” he told defense attorney Steinberg. “Because it’s the truth.”
Over the next few days, with upcoming testimony from at least one other alleged victim and a number of witnesses, jurors will decide whether they believe the alleged victim’s testimony. Whether an 11-year-old boy, whose father had died and whose mother had lost custody of him, put his faith in a doctor who told him he could help reunite the boy’s family. Whether that doctor repeatedly sexually abused that little boy and told him not to tell anyone else. Whether that boy spent the next 20+ years — in and out of prison, struggling with drug and alcohol abuse — denying that abuse out of shame.
Or whether this is a story made up by a man looking to lighten his prison sentence. The fantasy of a gang member whose mind has been addled by drugs, alcohol, and mental illness.
The jury will decide. I’ll have a Day 2 update tomorrow.