Judge to deliver his verdict on Tuesday

Crown prosecutor Robert Beck described the two RCMP officers on trial for sexual assault as opportunists targeting a vulnerable woman who was new to Watson Lake,

Crown prosecutor Robert Beck described the two RCMP officers on trial for sexual assault as opportunists targeting a vulnerable woman who was new to Watson Lake, where the alleged crime is to have occurred.

Constables Graham Belak, 30, and Shawn McLaughlin, 33, were charged in March of last year following complaints by a woman that she was raped at Belak’s house following a party in the border community.

“The accused were determined to have sex with (the woman),” Beck told the court this morning.

“And what better way to do that than pray on a victim that had little chance of being believed.”

Having arrived with her husband in Watson Lake just a week before the party and alleged rape, the woman had few friends or acquaintances.

She attended the party to get to know her new co-workers, she testified, and met the off-duty police officers there.

Belak and McLaughlin were friends, but neither knew the woman prior to the party, nor she the two officers.

While each had consumed alcohol on the evening in question, the two officers have testified they were not heavily intoxicated and neither was the woman.

However, testimony from other party guests heard during the trial describe the woman’s sobriety somewhere between mild intoxication, all the way to “sloppy drunk.”

The defence maintains their clients engaged in consensual sex with the woman and flatly rejected that the officers drugged her, as she testified to earlier in the trial.

“Surely you cannot accept that these two officers, or either one, drugged her and proceeded to have sex with her while she was completely unconscious for two hours,” said Robert Warren, McLaughlin’s lawyer, said in his closing submissions this morning.

“It just doesn’t make any sense.”

The toxicology report before the court shows no trace of a date rape drug.

Warren also questioned the alleged victim’s credibility on the witness stand, suggesting her spotty recollection of the evening’s events raised “red flags.”

“’I don’t remember’ and ‘I blacked out’ are convenient ways not to have to face the truth,” said Warren.

Andrew McKay, Belak’s lawyer, portrayed to the woman’s behaviour during the evening – at the party and when she moved to Belak’s with him and McLaughlin – as an invitation to sex.

“She made passes at the officers at the party and was sexually aggressive towards them,” said McKay. “These were words and actions of a consenting individual.”

McKay pointed to the woman’s conflicting stories to the doctor conducting the rape examination and that she failed to inform her husband or authorities of the alleged assault until 24 hours after the fact.

It is the defence’s position that the officers’ accuser did not want to her husband to know she had consented to sex with two other men and therefore concocted the rape story.

“She’s in a bind ... she thinks she might be outed,” McKay told the court. “So she comes up with this story that these officers drugged and raped her.”

But the Crown prosecutor argued it is understandable that a woman in the alleged victim’s condition would behave in the manner she did, considering the circumstances.

“She didn’t tell her husband that she had consensual sex because she didn’t have consensual sex,” Beck argued. “If we assume she was sexually assaulted by two police officers ... she’s not thinking straight, does not have her critical thinking skills.

“One person might go straight to their spouse and tell them they were assaulted, another might do what (the alleged victim) did,” Beck continued. “She was emotionally shut down.”

Following the Crown’s and defence’s submissions, which continued through to press time early this afternoon, Yukon Supreme Court Justice Leigh Gower must weigh the evidence and make a decision, expected Tuesday.