Racial remark in sex-assault
trial a mistake, city
prosecutor says

By Harold Morse
Star-Bulletin

A deputy prosecutor who used a racial comment in a sex-assault case made a mistake, city Prosecutor Peter Carlisle indicated.

"I have since spoken to both the deputy involved and all other deputies and informed them that unless you have to mention race, don't," Carlisle said yesterday.

Carlisle's statement came after the state Supreme Court, in a strongly worded opinion, overturned four third-degree sex assault counts against Jerome Rogan, a former Fort Shafter soldier who is black.

A Circuit Court jury last year convicted Rogan for a 1995 incident involving a 12-year-old girl, and he was sentenced to five years' probation.

During closing arguments, Deputy Prosecutor Victor Bakke told jurors the incident was "every mother's nightmare. Leave your daughter for an hour and a half, and you walk back in and here's some black military guy on top of your daughter."

A request for a mistrial was made at the time, but denied by Circuit Judge Dexter Del Rosario. However, yesterday's 47-page high court decision called Bakke's statement "an appeal to racial prejudice that had no objectively legitimate purpose."

In reversing the conviction and sentence, it held that "the deputy prosecutor's remark was so egregious, from an objective standpoint, that the inference is inescapable that the remark clearly denied Rogan his right to a fair trial."

The decision barred prosecuting Rogan again.

Prosecutors had dropped two other counts against Rogan after it was shown the girl had invited him to her home while her parents were away and told him she was 17.