By Wayne Gates

A Ripley man is facing life in prison after being convicted of multiple Rape and sex charges in Brown County Common Pleas Court.

37 year old Jonathan Turner was found guilty by a jury last week on eight sex related counts. Four of those counts were felony Rape charges, three of them were Gross Sexual Imposition charges and one was a felony assault charge. All of the charges relate to a single victim who was under ten years old when the crimes began.

The trial lasted four days from April 8 until April 11. Turner will be sentenced April 30. Two of his rape convictions carry a maximum sentence of life without parole and two others carry a maximum sentenced of 25 years to life.

He was indicted in January of 2018 on all of the counts that the jury found him guilty of 15 months later. He had been in the Brown County Jail since his arrest following the indictment.

Brown County Prosecuting Attorney Zac Corbin prosecuted the case. He said that the state presented 14 witnesses, including the victim who testified against Turner.

Turner took the stand in his own defense and denied any illegal acts.

“I felt like the trial went as well as things could.I felt that the evidence of guilt was overwhelming and I believed from the beginning that that was the case. The jury thankfully saw it our way,” said Brown County Prosecuting Attorney Zac Corbin.

He said things moved fairly quickly once the jury got the case.

“The first thing the jury wanted to do was to listen to the victim’s testimony again because she was pretty meek and mild on the stand,” Corbin said.

“Reading the transcript back to the jury probably took the bulk of the time that the jury was deliberating. Once they heard the testimony again, they deliberated less than an hour and came back with guilty on all counts.”

Corbin said that child rape cases are hard on everyone involved because many of them tend to go to trial.

“These types of cases are tough to work out a plea because we are not willing to reduce the charges in any that is attractive to the defendant. If we are dealing with someone that we think raped a child under ten, we are not going to offer them anything that they are going to jump at,” Corbin said. “He denied the entire time that he did anything wrong, so he was not going to accept any type of a plea.”

Corbin also said that his office broke some new ground in advocating for victims of crimes with this trial.

“This is the first time that we have gotten a felonious assault conviction on a rape case because of the psychological harm that was perpetrated against the victim. This child is going to suffer from the psychological affects of Mr. Turner’s actions for a long time,” he said.

The prosecutor’s office will be asking Judge Scott Gusweiler to sentence Turner to life in prison without the possibility of parole at his sentencing on April 30.

https://www.newsdemocrat.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/web1_Turner.jpg