ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1997, Roanoke Times
DATE: Friday, March 7, 1997 TAG: 9703070058
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: C7 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: LAURENCE HAMMACK
The prosecutor agreed to bargain because the woman waited 10 days to report the attack.
A Roanoke man has been sentenced to three years in prison for raping a woman he met in an alcohol-treatment program.
It was the third time in the past 10 years Mark L. Crews had been charged with rape. He was acquitted by a jury on one of the earlier charges, and the other was reduced through a plea agreement.
Crews, 38, of Gilmer Avenue, was charged with raping and sodomizing a woman last year in her Northwest Roanoke apartment. The woman, who said she had met him at an alcohol treatment program, encountered him as she was walking home from a convenience store and invited him to her apartment, where he raped and sodomized her, the woman told police.
The offense happened Oct. 22, but the woman reported it to police Nov. 1 - a time lapse that would have made the charges difficult to prove, Commonwealth's Attorney Donald Caldwell said.
"We fully expected the defense to be that she consented, and we did not have any corroborating evidence," he said.
As part of the plea agreement reached this week, prosecutors agreed to drop the sodomy charge and offer Crews a three-year sentence in exchange for his guilty plea to rape. Crews entered an Alford plea, meaning he maintained his innocence but did not dispute the charge.
In 1988, Crews was charged with raping a 62-year-old woman after visiting her apartment. He was acquitted by a jury. The following year, another rape charge was reduced to aggravated sexual battery under a plea agreement that set his sentence at two years in prison.
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