People v. Campbell

DRAPER, P. J.

Convicted of forcible rape (Pen. Code, § 261 subd. 3), defendant appeals.

At about 3 -.45 a.m., the prosecutrix left her ear and its occupants near Fourth and Harrison Streets in San Francisco. She walked around a comer. As she returned, a man seized her, dragged her into a parking lot, and raped her. Police were summoned, took the woman to an emergency hospital and received from her a description of the rapist and of the clothing and glasses he wore. Shortly thereafter, a policeman saw a man answering that description a short distance from the scene of the crime. The officer questioned the man, who said that he was walking home from specified places where he had spent the past several hours. The prosecutrix was brought to the scene in a police car. Upon seeing defendant, she became somewhat hysterical but identified him as the rapist. He was arrested and booked. At 11:45 a.m., he was questioned by police in the station. Questions and answers were recorded on a tape. The interrogatories were directed to the alibi defendant had given when first stopped

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by the policeman, and he gave a detailed statement of his whereabouts, which would show that he could not have been present at the scene of the rape at the time it occurred.

In the prosecution’s case in chief, the prosecutrix identified defendant as the rapist. An expert testified that a button found at the scene of the crime was torn from defendant’s shirt. Marks on defendant’s clothing were shown by analysis to have come from objects at the scene of the struggle between prosecutrix and the rapist, and other persuasive circumstantial evidence was produced. Also, the officer who stopped defendant at about 4:30 a.m. and the officer who interviewed him in the police station at 11:45 a.m. summarized his statements to them. The state also produced testimony of one witness whom defendant’s pretrial statements claimed to have been with him shortly before the crime. This witness denied seeing defendant that night. Defendant presented his evidence. He testified to an alibi which varied in some respects from that he had given to the police. He called a witness who failed in a material respect to substantiate this testimony. The prosecution, in rebuttal, offered and played the tape recording of defendant’s late morning statement of his alibi.