sex, Money and Meth Addiction

Parsing the Verdict in the Dasen Case

By Hal Herring, 5-23-05

Over and over, reporters and trial watchers wondered when Dick Dasen and his defense attorney would pull the rabbit from the hat, the rabbit that would contradict and explain that long procession of witnesses who testified to their sexual relationships with Dick Dasen and the money they received from him. The photos of the underage teenagers V and K engaged in sex - K with her braces and pink rubberbands - were in the white binder that had already been presented to the jury, so it seemed certain that the charge of sexual abuse of children would stick.

It is doubtful that V or K would claim that they had been “abused� that day. And if you wanted to view Dasen in the most positive possible light, you could argue that a 60-year-old-man who really loves sex could not be expected to refrain from relations with cash-hungry and willing nubiles. But the law does not really deal in such intangibles. If you take the photos, you have broken the law. It does not matter how you feel about what you are doing, or how the minors feel about what you, and they, are doing. There was never really anything presented by the defense that could negate the hard presence of those photographs. There was no rabbit in that hat.

The finding of guilty in the charge of promotion of prostitution was no surprise, either. A man can have a mistress, and he may pay her bills and expect that she have sex with him. He may even give her lots of money. But when a man pays dozens of women in the aftermath of sexual encounters, and does not know where they live, has never taken them out to dinner or a movie, has no evident relationship with them whatsoever outside the motel room where he meets them for sex, he is certainly open to the charge that he is promoting them to be or remain prostitutes, even if neither he nor they consider that to be true. Even if they never perform a single act of prostitution with any other man or woman, the law does not say that you have to have multiple sexual clients in order to be a prostitute.

The defense seemed to argue Dasen paid so much for his encounters that his acts sailed off into the stratosphere beyond the realm of prostitution, but the law does not specify whether you must pay $20 or $198,000 for the sexual act. It just says that you must pay. The rabbit in the hat for this one was the fact that only one witness ever said there was an explicit acknowledgement that the money that Dasen paid was for a sexual act. But that one witness, Ms. Veyna, was also one of the four prostitution charges that resulted in a finding of guilty. Promotion of prostitution is not necessarily maintaining a large stable of prostitutes. You can maintain just one and still be guilty.

It is a mystery how the jury made the incredibly nuanced decisions as to which prostitution charges were valid, and which were, as Dasen’s attorney George Best described all of them, adultery, but not prostitution. Prosecutor Lori Adams, in the aftermath of the trial, explained that the findings of not guilty on five of the prostitution chrages showed that the “jury paid attention and did what they were told to do. They didn’t lump all the charges together.� And indeed they did not. The jury apparently agreed with George Best that some of the witnesses were simply too predatory, or simply too unreliable. But some of the witnesses convinced them of the exchange of money for sex. What were the deciding factors? Hopefully, at some point, one or more of the jurors will tell that story.

And in discussing the final and most serious charges—sexual intercourse without consent and the aggravated promotion of prostitution, both charges related to the underage sexual encounter with T and M in Kim Neises’s home, where it was alleged that Dasen “overwhelmed� the two teens and participated in the encounter after agreeing to remain a voyeur—there is only conjecture. But an informed conjecture is that the civil suit filed by T’s mother, a $5.65 million civil suit—tainted the testimony, or the way the testimony was viewed. There is probably no witness on earth who could tell a story with $5.65 million dollars at stake—and have it believed without a single doubt by twelve normal people.

And T and M, as likeable and youthful as they appeared, were a couple of wandering wild children, dropped out of school and open to experience—possibly even moral anarchy-- to a degree that was probably terrifying to most of the jurors. M testified that she spent all of Dasen’s money in a cross-country odyssey through Canada, called him up, and got more. Only three people—Dasen, T and M, know what happened with the sex toy in that room in that dope-soaked townhouse, but in the end, with all that money hanging in the balance, the jurors recognized that there was certainly a reasonable doubt. It was not that the jury believed Dasen. It was that they could not wholly believe the witnesses.

For links to New West's full coverage of the Dasen case, including Hal Herring's six-part series, click here.

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