A Halifax County jury last week found a Roanoke Rapids man not guilty of second-degree rape stemming from charges filed against him in November of 2021, his attorney confirmed.
Roanoke Rapids attorney Geoffrey Davis also confirmed that the judge dismissed a sex offense count against Robert Wyatt Lee Wilson Jr. before it got to the jury because there wasn’t enough evidence to put on for that charge.
The trial began last Tuesday and ended Wednesday afternoon after the jury deliberated for approximately 45 minutes to an hour before rendering the not guilty verdict.
At the time Wilson was 19 and Davis said the alleged victim was a 20-year-old woman.
“It’s basically a case where she said one thing happened. He said the other. The jury listened to the evidence and made their decision and rendered (the) verdict of not guilty.”
Davis said the case came down to a question of consent. “I don’t think there was any question that some kind of sexual act occurred. It was a question of consent — whether consent was given, whether it was withdrawn, things like that. My client had one side of that and the alleged victim had the other.”
The attorney said there are so many times a juror or a lawyer or anybody else that wasn’t there can’t go back in time and put themselves through the mind of a person. “But they can look at the surrounding things, the surrounding pieces of evidence — what somebody does in the run-up to things, what they do after to kind of help explain things and to say this was what was actually going on at the time based on these other surrounding facts that I have. I think that was part of it too.”
Davis believes his client can move on from this episode. “I’ll say too my heart goes out to the victim in the case because she’s young too and my hope is they can kind of put this stuff behind them and kind of move on.”
Said Davis: “It’s been a long three years since he was charged. Somebody at his age having a criminal charge makes it very difficult for him to kind of get his life started as far as getting employment and things like that but with this kind of being behind him now he should be able to move on.”
