Culture, law clash in rape case against St. Louis immigrant
By Jennifer Mann
The Associated Press
Posted Apr 24, 2012 @ 08:46 AM


ST. LOUIS —

The wheels of justice started grinding against a distant culture the day the soft-spoken seventh-grader walked into a Planned Parenthood clinic here with a swollen belly, seeking an abortion.

The nonprofit clinic called social services, which in turn called St. Louis police. Investigators presented facts to prosecutors, who in February 2011 filed a first-degree statutory rape charge against Asannay Marbati, the 20-something father-to-be.

By that time, the girl — age 12 according to the charges — had decided to proceed with the pregnancy, and Marbati had moved next door to her family on Gasconade Street.

The girl and her mother told detectives that the one-time sexual encounter that impregnated her was acceptable in Eritrea, the war-torn country from which they fled. Marbati, also from Eritrea, told them the same.

But that doesn’t matter under Missouri law.

Detectives had to explain repeatedly to Marbati, through an interpreter, that regardless of what is acceptable in Eritrea, having sex with a minor is a major crime here — punishable by five years to life in prison.

If the law was just that simple, the circumstances of this case were not.

The girl was 12 only because of the best guess of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials when she arrived in 2007. In the village where she was born, it so happens, they do not follow a calendar year nor track ages.

Marbati’s attorney, John Rogers, seized on that part of the culture to build what might have seemed like a long-shot defense: How can the state prove the girl was under the age of consent if nobody really knows how old she is?

For that matter, nobody knew for sure if Marbati was 22, the age on his Social Security card. If he was under 21, and she was 14 or older, it would have been considered a lesser crime.

When the case went to a bench trial on March 26, St. Louis Circuit Judge Angela Turner-Quigless accepted Rogers’ point about the girl’s arbitrary age, dismissing the charge. Circuit Attorney Jennifer Joyce filed a notice of appeal. She issued a statement saying, "We believe a serious crime against a child has occurred."

———

Marbati’s birthday, according to all his American records, is Jan. 1. It is the girl’s birthday, too, and her mother’s and her brother’s. Countless immigrants, in fact, carry that birth date because of the semi-random nature in which they were assigned.



Culture, law clash in rape case against St. Louis immigrant - Utica, NY - The Observer-Dispatch, Utica, New York