Pocono Mountain Regional Police officer Steven Mertz detained a woman, drunk at the wheel of her car, then threatened her with a DUI charge if she refused to have sex with him. She did so, intoxicated, against his patrol car. Then he blackmailed her with "their secret"—all admitted in testimony—demanding she have sex with him again lest he find his notes. He found them anyway.
This wasn't rape, jurors unanimously found, but merely taking a bribe—a lesser charge for which he was sentenced to 30 to 60 months in jail. They agreed with his defense that "his role as her arresting officer did not constitute as an imbalance of power, nor did her impairment preclude her from being able to consent".
The verdict concluded a weeklong trial that blended emotional testimony with line-by-line narration of messages shared between Mertz and his accuser.
"You're a thousand percent sure I'm not getting the DUI from last night?" the woman asked in one. "Yes," Mertz texted back. "I'm sure. Positive." The report would get lost among all his other reports, he said. It was their secret.
Mertz testified later that he was lying to the woman. He said he planned to file the DUI charge but was "stringing her along" because he wanted to keep having sex with her.
Beyond the sexist contempt and cop-worship of almost everyone involved in this, "acquiescing to a threat amounts to bribery that justifies the threat, but not the acceptance of the bribe" is a magnificently batshit legal outcome right up there with America's worst.
