Baker man convicted of rape, sexual abuse

A Baker County jury deliberated into the evening Thursday before returning to the courtroom to announce their findings of guilty on all three counts against a man accused of raping a young woman he’d supplied with tequila who had passed out in her bed and was incapable of consenting to sex.

Charles Matthew Ferguson, 29, of 14180 Ben Dier Road, was convicted of one count each of first-degree rape, second-degree sexual abuse and furnishing alcohol to a minor. Sentencing has been scheduled for 1:30 p.m. Monday in Baker County Circuit Court.

Shirtcliff said the four-woman, eight-man jury, which began deliberating at 11 a.m. Thursday, returned at 4 p.m. to tell Judge Greg Baxter that jurors had reached a verdict on two of the charges, but were deadlocked on the third count.

Baxter then issued a “deadlock jury instruction” in which he asked jurors to continue talking and to reconsider their views in one more attempt to reach a verdict, Shirtcliff said. Jurors returned at 6:30 p.m. with the verdicts. They voted 10-2 to convict Ferguson on the sex crimes and were unanimous in convicting him of furnishing alcohol to the victim, Shirtcliff said.

“This is a case about a defendant who took something from a young woman,” Shirtcliff said in his opening statement to the jury Tuesday afternoon. “He took her dignity.”

Shirtcliff said Ferguson also took the virginity of the young woman when he raped her the night of July 14, 2008, at her Baker City home as she lay passed out in her bed after drinking two half glasses of tequila he brought to the house.

The Baker City Herald does not report the names of victims of sexual assault.

The 19-year-old woman, who has since turned 20, took the stand Tuesday to tell the jury how she had invited Ferguson, whom she’d met through a mutual friend, to her home several times to watch a movie and share a drink and a meal.

On the night of July 14 she invited him over after work and consumed the tequila while preparing dinner. After a while she said she became nauseous and threw up three times before deciding to go to bed for the night.

She said Ferguson came into her room and kissed her and she asked him to leave. She said the last thing she could remember before she fell asleep was Ferguson sitting behind her on the bed.

“I told him, dude, just go way. I wasn’t interested in him like that. I had no feelings for him romantically at all,” she said, adding that Ferguson knew she was a virgin and that it was important to her to remain a virgin until she was married.

She remembered him saying, “I wouldn’t take that from you,” she told the jury.

When she awoke the next morning, Ferguson was naked in bed beside her and she felt pain in her vaginal area.

“I had a really bad feeling,” she said, adding that she had “curled up in a ball and started crying.”

Ferguson asked if she was OK before leaving for work. The two next contacted each other via cell phone text messages, which were entered as evidence in the trial.

In one of the messages, Ferguson had typed “I could have told you nothing happened and you wouldn’t have known.”

The victim said she confronted Ferguson about what happened in a telephone conversation the night of July 15.

“He told me he cared about me a lot and wanted to work things out,” she said. “I told him there was nothing there to work out, that that wasn’t an option.”

The victim then called a family friend, Bo Hansen, a corrections deputy at the Baker County Jail, to tell him what had happened and to ask his advice about how to proceed. She called her father on July 16 and then reported the crimes to police.

“(The victim) did a really good job,” Shirtcliff said today. “She showed a lot of courage going forward with the case.

“For her this has been a real emotionally difficult thing, going through the trial,” he said. “She was very happy with the result.”

He added that the issue of acquaintance rape is a concern nationwide.

“This was an important case for us, for this office and for the community,” Shirtcliff said.

Ferguson’s attorney, Victoria Moffet of La Grande, contended that the victim consented to having sex with Ferguson and then was upset about what had happened.

“Regret is not rape,” Moffet told the jury.