Daryl Kelly has lost his bid for freedom and will serve his 40 years in prison despite the fact that his daughter admitted to lying about him raping her when she was eight years old. Chaneya Kelly, now 25, says that her then-drug addicted mother, Charade, encouraged her to lie about her father raping her.
“She repeatedly asked me, has my dad touched me,” recalled Chaneya. “I was like, ‘What do you mean, did he touch me?’ And she was like, ‘Did he touch you in your no-no spot?’ And I would repeatedly say no.”
Chaneya claims that her mother was insistent that she admit to being raped by her father. “If you don’t tell me the answer that I want to hear, I’m going to beat you,” Charade would say.
Chaneya would later tell police what her mother wanted to hear. After an examination by doctors and nurses, they issued a report that there was “possible sexual abuse” due to some redness, but Chaneya’s hymen was intact despite the fact she claimed that her father had penetrated her. It didn’t matter. With mother and daughter telling the same story, Daryl was charged with multiple counts of rape and sodomy. Six months later Chaneya came forward to her grandmother to tell her the truth about her mother and her lies. Chaneya’s grandmother took the tape to the attorney, who said that the little girl looked uncomfortable and suggested that the recantation was coerced. The judge refused to overturn the conviction. When asked why Charade would tell her daughter to lie about being raped she said, “I have no idea, I really don’t.” NBC reported that the reasons that the District Attorney recently chose not to vacate the case were as follows:
— A judge evaluated the same evidence 15 years ago and has already decided the recantation wasn’t credible.
— In a recorded prison phone call, prosecutors found it disturbing that Kelly once greeted Chaneya by saying, “Hey, sexy.”
— Kelly lied about being awarded a purple heart when he was in the Navy, showing his true character. — Experts caution to be wary of recantation, especially in a case like this. “The relationship between the defendant and his recanting accuser — father and daughter — is renowned at law and in social science as one most likely to breed a false recantation,” said the report.
— Most of all, the report claims that despite Chaneya’s insistence that she wasn’t raped, her story is not credible, saying she “can neither explain why she falsely advanced such a horrible allegation, nor why she adhered to it for so long and repeated it to so many different people.”
Daryl’s current attorney Peter Cross finds it disturbing that only lawyers, not mental health professionals were used to assess Chaneya’s credibility as a witness, so he hired one to evaluate the case. Dr. Roy Lubit interviewed Chaneya and found her recantation to be “highly credible.” Lubit said there was “no corroborative evidence of the alleged abuse. “ Lubit argued: “To a reasonable degree of medical certainty CK’s recantation of her allegation her father sexually abused her when she was 8 years of age is not only credible but true,” wrote Lubit. “The basic scenario leaves more than reasonable doubt that the child was sexually abused by her father.”
Despite all of this evidence, Daryl’s conviction was upheld.
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