Photo: Chip Somodevilla/Getty; Jack Kurtz/The Arizona Republic via AP, Pool
Rachel Mitchell, chief of the special victims division of the Maricopa County Attorney’s Office, has worked as a prosecutor for 26 years and headed the bureau responsible for prosecuting child molestation, adult sexual assault, and sex-related cold cases,according totheArizona Republic.
Mitchell’s most high-profile case until now involved the prosecution of Catholic priest Paul LeBrun, sentenced in 2005 to 111 years in prison for molesting six young boys between the ages of 11 and 13 in the late 1980s to early ’90s,according toThe Washington Post.
Maricopa County defense attorney Rhonda Neff tellsthePhoenix New Timesthat Mitchell “is known as a very good trial attorney and a very direct trial attorney. I will assume her questions will be very direct and very understandable. I don’t think she’ll beat around the bush.”
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Mitchell’s boss, Maricopa County Attorney Bill Montgomery, describes her as a “professional, fair, objective prosecutor” with a “caring heart” for victims, according to theArizona Republic.
Mitchell first decided to deal with sex crimes against children while working on a case involving a youth choir director while she was a law clerk, she said in aFrontLinemagazine story.
“It was different than anything that I would have ever imagined it being,” she said. “It struck me how innocent and vulnerable the victims of these cases really were.”
Mitchell’s careercontinued to focus on sex crimes involving children, with cases from child molestation to those involving computer sex crimes, and she has trained others how to deal with children who are victims of abuse.
Not all of Mitchell’s cases have resulted in positive results for victims. ThePhoenix New Timesreported that Mitchell faced criticism about her handling of a plea deal she helped negotiate with a former Jehovah’s Witness elder following his admission of sexually abusing a teenage boy in the 1980s.
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In explaining the plea deal, Mitchell toldNew Timesthat it would have been hard to prove one of the incidents of the alleged abuse because the victim couldn’t determine when it happened.
Ford toldthe Washington Postthat during a high school party in the early 1980s, an allegedly drunk Kavanaugh held her down to a bed, groped her, grinded his body against hers and tried to take off her bathing suit.
Kavanaughhas denied all allegations of sexual assault. In an interview with Fox News on Sunday, he said, “I never sexually assaulted anyone. I did not have sexual intercourse or anything close to sexual intercourse in high school or for many years thereafter. The girls from the schools I went to and I were friends.”
source: people.com
