Orr not guilty
Jury takes less than two hours to acquit ex-guard in jail sex case

By Bill Donovan
Staff Writer

GALLUP — It took the jury less than two hours with lunch included to find Brian Orr not guilty of using his power at the McKinley County Adult Detention Center to sexually abuse three female prisoners in 2003.

The issue in the trial centered around the fact that jurors had to decide who was telling the truth the three female prisoners from Wyoming or Orr, who worked at the facility at the time.

The three women told the jury of having girlfriend-boyfriend relations with Orr, getting gifts and being abused. One woman told of being handcuffed nude in his office while he took photos of her on his digital camera.

The problem was that was all the jury had to go by the words of the three women. There was no corroborating evidence and Steve Seeger, Orr's defense attorney, stressed in his closing arguments the background of the three women and the reasons why they were in jail in the first place.

Pointing out their crimes, which ranged from forgery and passing bad checks to distribution of methampthemines, he asked the jury "would you buy a vehicle" from them?

In the end, the jury apparently decided not to believe anyone and issued a statement after the verdict about "the poor quality of the investigation" and their belief that it wasn't done "in a professional and competent manner."

There was some question about the wording of the statement as to whether the investigation referred to was the current one done by investigators for the District's Attorney's office or the original one done three years ago by the Wyoming Department of Corrections and Management Training Center, the private company that ran the jail for the county.

One juror said after the verdict that the jury wasn't impressed with either. She was especially critical of the current investigation, saying that the jury felt that more could have been done to substantiate the women's stories.

But Mike Calligan, the chief deputy prosecutor for the district attorney's office and the primary prosecutor in this case, said his office did everything it could to bring forth more evidence.

By the time the district attorney's office got involved with the case almost two years after the fact all of the evidence was gone or destroyed, he said.

For example, there was the nude photos that Orr reportedly took of one of the women.

Testimony in the trial indicated that the computer in question was confiscated in the first investigation and its hard drive was checked to see if any trace of the photos could be found. They couldn't, and nothing was said that indicated the computer was available for a re-examination in this current investigation.

Seeger said after the verdict that this is the problem you have when you bring a case that is solely based on "he said, she said" evidence. Even if you give both sides equal weight on the scales of justice, that's nowhere near enough to convict someone, he said.

He said he also still felt that Orr's criminal prosecution was pushed by the American Civil Liberties Union, which had filed a civil suit on behalf of the three women against Orr and MTC. In order to get a settlement, he said, the ACLU needed Orr to be criminally prosecuted as well.

Calligan said this wasn't so, adding that if the ACLU were really interested in using the criminal case to get a settlement in its case, why did it settle before the criminal case came to trial? And if this were true, why would the criminal case be continued since the ACLU would have no reason to continue to exert pressure?