This article appeared in today's issue of Ocean City Today newspaper. Taxi driver guilty of raping inebriated passenger By Nancy Powell Associate Editor (Jan. 19, 2007) The Nepalese taxi driver lowered his head and cried in Circuit Court last week after a jury found him guilty of raping a passenger in Ocean City. “I’ve never been in trouble,” said Sachindra Nepal, 26, knowing that he would be deported to his home country of Nepal, in court in Snow Hill on Jan. 11. A permanent resident of the United States, but not an American citizen, Nepal came to this country in 2003 and obtained an associates degree in microbiology at Austin Community College in Texas. He worked two full-time jobs while earning his degree. He then moved to Massachusetts where he was hoping to get a grant to attend a university there. The grant did not materialize and Nepal came to Ocean City to work in 2005 to earn money for college. He worked at Wawa and then started driving a taxi. The incident leading to the charges against him began on July 16 when he had been a taxi driver for just five days. A man flagged down his taxi near the Bagles and Buns eatery on 71st Street. He wanted to find a ride for an intoxicated 18-year-old woman from Ocean Pines. Minutes earlier, the man working there had found the young woman slumped over at an outside table, her head in a flowerpot. She had ended up there after jumping out of a window at a 73rd Street apartment that police had visited because of underage drinking. When she testified, she said she had drunk three or four shots of tequila, some beer, some rum and cokes, more beer and more tequila. She said she did not have to work the next day, so she was not worried about how much she drank. She said she did not remember the police arriving, but she recalled getting out of the window and hitting the ground. The next thing she recalled was waking up in a strange bed with a man she did not recognize beside her. Nepal testified that the young woman entered the taxi van and told Nepal she wanted to go to Ocean Pines. Nepal drove her there, but she was unable to tell him the name of the street where she lived, although, he said, she was sitting up straight and answering questions. After searching unsuccessfully for a while, Nepal returned to Ocean City. On the ride back to the resort, the young woman became very friendly, he said. “She was holding my hand and putting her hand on my leg and all that stuff,” Nepal testified. He asked her if she would like to go to a hotel with him and she said that she would, he said. They went to the Royalton Hotel, and they went up the stairs hand-in-hand to the third floor to share a room. It was after 2 a.m. The woman later told police that she was embarrassed that her boyfriend and others might find out she spent the night at the hotel. Nepal left the room to park the taxi in a different spot and when he returned to the room, “she gave me her arms,” he testified. She kissed him and he returned the kiss, he said. They engaged in sex and went to sleep. The next morning, they awoke and he asked if she wanted something to drink. He went to get two sodas and she asked him if they had had sex. She told him she did not remember anything. She looked angry, so he told her no, he testified. They dressed, went downstairs and she used his cell phone to call a friend to pick her up. She then gave him $25 for the previous night’s taxi ride to Ocean Pines and back and he left to go to the car wash because she had vomited in the taxi. While at the car wash, he got a phone call from the girl’s mother and then from the police. On Aug. 4, he was served with papers charging him with rape and other offenses. In addition to Nepal and the young woman, the jury heard testimony from a detective, the cook at Bagels and Buns and the desk clerk at the Royalton Hotel. After about 90 minutes of deliberations, the jury found Nepal guilty of second-degree rape, second-degree sex offense, third-degree sex offense, fourth-degree sex offense and second-degree assault. As Deputy State’s Attorney Jennifer Rothschild had said at the beginning of the trial, the facts of the case were not in dispute. Nepal and the woman engaged in sexual relations. What was in dispute was whether she was too inebriated to give consent. Rothschild’s case was that the woman was so inebriated that she was incapacitated and unable to give consent. The law defines mentally incapacitated as being substantially unable to appreciate what’s happening, so the jury had to determine just how inebriated the young woman was. Defense attorney Burton Anderson tried unsuccessfully to convince the jury that the woman was not unconscious and she was not physically unable to resist. She entered the taxi unaided, she held his hand, she kissed him, she entered the hotel, she walked up the stairs and she entered the hotel room. “Nepal had every reason to believe they were engaged in an adult consensual incident,” Anderson said. Being embarrassed about what she has done does not give a woman the right to cry rape, he said. After the jury returned its verdict, Judge Theodore Eschenburg said each of the two young people made mistakes. The woman would never forget what happened to her and the young man, who had had a very promising future, would be deported because the law requires it. Eschenburg sentenced Nepal to one year in jail. The case, he said, did not warrant a five-year sentence. The judge said he believed that Nepal was a nice young man and the woman was a nice young lady. Two lives have been changed and not necessarily for the better, he said. This was the sort of case, Eschenburg said, where there could have been two juries and each would have come up with different verdicts and no fault could be found with either of them. “You had a tough job and you did your job,” Eschenburg told the jurors just before they left the courtroom.