Teenage Football Star Found Guilty of Rape in Ohio

Guilty verdict: Ma’lik Richmond (pictured right) reacts after learning the verdict in his trial at the juvenile court in Steubenville, Ohio, March 17

A star football player sensationally convicted at the Ohio rape trial is to appeal Sunday’s verdict.

Ma’lik Richmond, 16, was found guilty of raping a 16-year-old too drunk to stop him – so drunk that the following day she had no recollection of the crime exposed through social media and Richmond and co-accused Trent Mays’s, 17, own texts.

Speaking to MailOnline Richmond’s attorney, Mr Walter Madison revealed: ‘We have the right to appeal and that is a right we will be exercising.’

This revelation that he does not accept the finding of delinquent (juvenile court equivalent of guilty) comes just hours after Richmond broke down in tearful apology to the victim’s mother and was granted her forgiveness.

‘We feel very much that the people who prosecuted Ma’lik potentially granted a rapist a free pass’, Mr Madison said.

Mr Madison was referring to a key prosecution witness who testified on condition of immunity.

His testimony was the only account of the night of 11-12 August in which Richmond was seen digitally penetrating the victim.

But throughout the four day trial Mr Madison repeatedly called into question the witness’s motivation and his own potential guilt.

DNA samples were obtained from only four of the five footballers present in the basement where the victim was stripped, photographed, violated and humiliated.

None were a match for a solitary sperm cell found on the crotch of the shorts she wore that night.

Only one refused to surrender a DNA sample and that was the witness, whose testimony damned Richmond while attempting to exonerate himself.

He recorded the notorious Mike Nodianos video that same night and can be heard laughing.
According to Mr Madison: ‘His testimony was absolutely incredible’.

‘He was the first suspect (detective) Jean Philippe Rigaud had. He is the man laughing in the Nodianos video, that’s who he is when nobody else is watching. Not the softly spoken witness we saw in court.’

‘He gets an attorney before a crime is even reported and his attorney says his DNA sample can’t be taken.

‘What possible reason would he have to refuse? But what makes all this worse and compounds it, he was granted immunity. ‘

Mr Madison also pointed to the testimony of Shawn McGhee, now a student at Campbellsville University, Kentucky, Richmond’s cousin and Mays’s best friend.

McGhee was the only one to speak out when the Nodianos video was being made and a now infamous image of the victim, carried by ankles and wrists as Mays treads on her hair, was shown.

He called and then texted Mays furiously threatening to ‘choke’ him and warning him ‘you can go to jail for that s***’

‘We hear nothing about Shawn McGhee being angry with Ma’lik,’ Mr Madison pointed out.

Richmond was placed in foster care at the age of 7 when his alcoholic father went to prison.

To that point, Mr Madison revealed, ‘every house he lived in had been shot up and his cousin killed.’

But the circumstances of his childhood had no bearing on Judge Thomas Lipps’s verdict or on his sentencing, which could see both Richmond and Mays in juvenile detention until the age of 21.

Mr Bob Fitzsimmons, the victim’s attorney, declined to comment on Richmond’s appeal.

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