DALLAS (AP) – An appeals court overturned the conviction of a former Baylor football player whose sexual assault case helped ignite a scandal that engulfed the nation’s largest Baptist school.
The Texas 10th Court of Appeals said in a ruling Wednesday that text messages between the accuser and friend should not have been excluded from the testimony in Sam Ukwuachu’s 2015 trial in Waco. The court ordered that a new trial be held for the former standout defensive end for the Bears.
The accuser exchanged text messages with a friend before and after the offense. But the trial court two years ago allowed testimony based only on the texts that came afterward, in which the accuser told her friend that Ukwuachu raped her.
But Ukwuachu argued that the earlier texts showed the woman had consented to sex.
“In this case, the text messages were made immediately prior to the offense and appeared to potentially relate to prior occasions where the victim and Ukwuachu had engaged in some type of sexual conduct,” justices determined in their ruling.