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There's a trial scheduled in March at the marble courthouse in Newark, N.J., of a man charged with kidnapping and raping a young woman with an intellectual disability.
That trial is likely to be a quiet one, with little attention, nothing like the feverish national press coverage 25 years ago of the trial — in that same courthouse — in another case of sexual assault of another young woman with an intellectual disability.
The rape of someone with an intellectual disability remains one of the hardest crimes for police to investigate and one of the hardest for prosecutors to win in court. A victim with an intellectual disability may have trouble speaking, or may not have words at all. And when victims can speak, they may have trouble telling precise details, which makes them easy to confuse in a courtroom.
That makes the rape of someone with an intellectual disability one of the easiest crimes to get away with. A perpetrator is free to rape again. And that's one reason people with intellectual disabilities are sexually assaulted at more than seven times the rate of people without disabilities. NPR obtained that number from unpublished data provided by the Justice Department.
In the years since Glen Ridge, Laurino and his prosecutors have learned — as have prosecutors around the country — how to better pursue these tricky cases. And those lessons are being applied to the trial of Khrishad Clark, the man charged with kidnapping and raping a 29-year-old woman with an intellectual disability. That's the trial set to begin in March in Newark.