The 23-year-old Chicago native sat motionless as a Douglas County jury returned the unanimous verdict after 90 minutes of deliberation.
University of Illinois basketball standout Terrence Shannon Jr. testifies during his rape trial, June 13, 2024, in Lawrence, Kansas. LAWRENCE, Kansas — Terrence Shannon Jr., the University of Illinois men’s basketball star and potential first-round pick in this month’s NBA draft, has been found not guilty of grabbing an 18-year-old woman’s buttocks under her skirt and penetrating her vagina with his finger in September at a bar near the University of Kansas campus.
“Two things aren’t debatable,” Sutter told jurors. “Simple science dictates that Terrence Shannon Jr. isn’t responsible for this crime, and there’s been absolutely no effort to find the perpetrator guilty of this crime.”The state’s case largely centered on testimony from Shannon’s accuser and her best friend, who was with her the night of the alleged encounter in a basement bar area of the Jayhawk Cafe called the Martini Room.
When it was over, she said, she pushed through the crowd to leave and to look for her friend. The two eventually left the bar. By then, she said, she was too hysterical to drive. She and her friend spoke with police that same Saturday of the alleged sexual assault and then went to a Lawrence hospital, where a sexual assault nurse examination kit was collected. The two eventually returned to the Martini Room later that same night, according to testimony from a computer forensics expert who, acting on a defense subpoena, extracted data from the woman’s friend’s phone.
The KBI forensic scientist wrote in her report that swabs from the interior and exterior crotch of the woman’s underwear revealed an “insufficient amount of male DNA” to move forward with testing, though she told jurors Wednesday that those levels were essentially too low to say conclusively whether they were even DNA.
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