Attorney Jeffrey Barrar recently won a trial in Clark County District Court.

A jury needed only about 15 minutes to deliberate before unanimously voting to acquit Barrar’s client of fourth-degree assault domestic violence, a gross misdemeanor punishable by up to one year in jail.

About three months ago, Barrar’s client’s girlfriend called 911 and told a Clark County Sheriff’s deputy that she had been assaulted by her boyfriend, who was arrested and had to spend the weekend in the Clark County Jail before he could see a judge and be released pending trial.

During the August 4 trial, however, the girlfriend changed her story.  Even after an assistant city attorney showed her a statement describing the incident, which she wrote the day she called 911 in May, she insisted that she wasn’t thinking clearly at the time because she had stopped taking her medication.

 

While she initially said her boyfriend slammed her into a wall during an argument, causing a bruise, at trial she said she got the bruise when she fell down.  

In the statement that she filled out for officers, she wrote that her boyfriend “grabbed me, & slammed me down on the carpet, slamming me against the wall, causing a bruise on my left shoulder.”

The assistant city attorney pointed out to the woman that she signed the form “under penalty of perjury.” Barrar asked the woman if she knows what the word “perjury” means, and she said yes, but then gave the definition of plagiarism: “When you copy somebody else’s work,” she said.

The girlfriend also told jurors that she was the aggressor and she was out of line, and she was acting out because she was having withdrawals from going off of her medication. She said she tried to take her boyfriend’s cigarettes and he didn’t want her to have them, and she fell while trying to grab them from his hand. 

During his closing argument, Barrar told jurors that his client's girlfriend told them the truth while she was on the witness stand, and she got ripped apart by the prosecutor, who raised the possibility that she could now be charged with perjury for making a false statement. Despite that intimidation, she stuck to her story that she was the aggressor, Barrar said, and the jurors should honor her wishes and find her boyfriend not guilty.