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 The woman was raped and sodomized by Brandon Vandenburg and Cory
Batey while unconscious in Vandenburg's dorm room on the morning of
June 23, 2013, Deputy District Attorney General Tom Thurman told the
jury.
Thurman added that Batey urinated on the victim while using racial
slurs and the rape was recorded on a cell phone.
Defense attorneys countered that the two men, who both pleaded not
guilty, should not be convicted because Batey was too drunk to make
a conscious decision at the time and that Vandenburg did not do
anything.
Batey's attorney, Worrick Robinson, sought a mistrial, saying, "I
don’t know if we can recover," following Thurman's almost
minute-by-minute description, and pointing particularly to the
details of the urination and the slurs.
Thurman said the woman was totally incapacitated after a night of
drinking, much of it with Vandenburg, and she was taken back to his
dorm room.
"Within two minutes of her being in the room she is sexually
assaulted," Thurman told the jury.
Batey's attorney said the football player from Nashville was
influenced by a campus culture of sexual freedom, promiscuity and
excessive alcohol consumption that contrasted with the manner of his
upbringing.
The atmosphere "changed the rest of his life," and Batey was too
drunk at the time to deliberately commit a crime, he added.
Vandenburg’s attorney, Fletcher Long, said two other men originally
arrested, Brandon Banks and Jaborian McKenzie, would testify against
his client as well as Batey.
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Both lawyers warned the jury to be wary of the testimony of the two,
because of deals they may get in exchange for speaking.
All four men were kicked off the football team and banned from
campus after the charges were leveled.
A fifth Vanderbilt football player, Chris Boyd, had faced up to two
years in prison on a felony charge of allegedly helping to cover up
the crime, but was placed on probation for a year in exchange for
his testimony against his former teammates.
He, too, was kicked off the football team but was allowed to finish
his undergraduate work at Vanderbilt.
(Editing by Curtis Skinner and Clarence Fernandez)
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