It has been two years now since Ajay Dev was convicted of raping his adopted daughter over 750 times over a five-year period and sentenced to 378 years in prison.  Since that time, family and friends have worked tirelessly to prove his innocence.

Usually, when activists will hold a protest, the first turnout is relatively large but the numbers decrease steadily over subsequent protests.  That has not been the case here.  If anything, two years after the verdict, we see more outpouring of support, and by all accounts this may have been their largest protest ever with between 250 and 300 people in attendance.

This perhaps was also the best program that family and friend organized in support of Mr. Dev, who has been unable to see his two young sons due to the nature of the charges against him.

The family and friends spent countless hours pouring through ten thousand pages of court transcripts.  They discussed in great detail a number of examples of what they call lies told by the accuser.

While these lies generally were peripheral to the case, the family argues this reflects a state of mind in which the accuser would tell different stories based on whom she was talking to.

As Terry Easley, Mr. Dev's sister-in-law, said, "Her story changed repeatedly, and alarmingly so upon the power of suggestion.  When she emphatically denied an act in one setting, such as the initial police interview, she would change her story or rather grow her story, upon the suggestion of the other party. 

One example that the family highlighted was when she testified that three times she had an abortion.  She was asked by the prosecutor, Deputy DA Steve Mount, at the preliminary hearing whether she had sexual relations with anyone other than Mr. Dev.  The accuser testified no.

However, during the court trial she described that her first sexual encounter with someone was in December of 2003 with her third boyfriend.

She would then testify that he was the first boyfriend that she had sex with, except that later it came out she had also had sexual relations that included sexual intercourse with her second boyfriend.

She also claimed to have had three abortions, though the medical records indicate otherwise.  In fact, the medical records indicate a miscarriage in January of 2003 and an abortion in May of 2003.  In November of 2003, she had a negative pregnancy test.

Finally, they showed evidence that claims about Mr. Dev showing his adopted daughter pornography were also false.  He was acquitted of these charges because the files did not even exist when the accuser said he showed them to her. It was also found that the files were viewed on the home computer while Ajay was at work and the accuser was the only one at home..

Moreover, she testified that Mr. Dev showed her a pornographic movie in 999 when she was 15, however, the laptop was not even purchased until 2001.

Investigators discovered, further, that the movie did not even exist until January 2000.

These are but three of several examples mentioned by the family of what they called lies told by the accuser.

As Sanjay Dev told the audience, "You heard about five or six lies.  I witnessed at least 50 lies inside the courtroom."

He continued, "Had it not been for Detective Mark Hermann interfering with her, taking her right before lunch, picking her and coaching her, telling her, it's better to say that you don't know - because he knew she was lying."

Mr. Dev told the audience that when she returned from lunch she repeated testified that she did not know or did not remember critical details.



Ajay Dev's wife, Peggy spoke to the group on what was her 14th wedding anniversary, saying that the accuser lied and explaining the girl's state of mind as that she was angry and was defying her parents.

Mrs. Dev said that she did not want to stand there and watch her throw her education away with her wild and carefree lifestyle.

"I brought her over here for a better life, I did not want to watch her throw her life away," she said.

"She lied, she was angry at us, but she tried to retract that," Mrs. Dev added.  She argued that the police's job is to investigate the facts and decide who is lying and who is telling the truth, "but that didn't happen here.  If you watch the video interview the first time this man speaks to her, she said, I would like to talk to my mom about this.  He replied 'that won't be good for the case.' "

"He had already made it a case," she added.

The DA, in their case, argued that Mr. Dev had raped his adopted daughter between 1999 and 2004.

The victim had been officially adopted by Mr. Dev and his wife in December of 1999 and, according to the victim’s testimony, Mr. Dev began inappropriately touching her within the first couple of weeks of her arrival and later progressed to forced sexual assault and rape on a weekly basis.

The assaults, the DA alleges, continued after the victim turned 18 and was attending Sacramento City College but still lived in the Dev household. The victim moved out of the home in December of 2004, and the prosecution said Mr. Dev continued to try to sexually abuse the victim and even offered to pay her to do so. Mr. Dev threatened to get a gun and shoot himself and the victim if she didn’t allow him to continue to abuse her, which ultimately led to the victim reporting the situation to law enforcement.

The trial lasted for two months. After the jury deliberated for one week, Mr. Dev was convicted of 76 felony counts including 23 counts of forcible rape; 23 counts of forcible sexual assault; 27 counts of lewd acts with a minor; and 3 counts of attempting to dissuade a witness. The jury hung on three of the counts and returned not guilty verdicts on 13 others.

Critical to the evidence was Detective Mark Hermann of the Davis Police Department, who, while interviewing the victim, had her call the defendant on the phone. According to the DA's account, "During the recorded phone call, the victim engaged him in a conversation about the abusive relationship and whether she should tell her school counselor that he, Mr. Dev, was the cause of her three abortions. What ensued was a conversation where Mr. Dev admitted the abuse and ultimately tried to talk the victim out of reporting it."

The family tells a different story though.  They argue that the conversation which meandered between English and Nepalese included numerous emphatic denials by Mr. Dev, and that the so-called admission was in fact a hypothetical taken out of context but mistranslated by the court.

On Wednesday, the family laid out their own version of events.

Terry Easley, sister-in-law to Ajay said that she was not related to either the accused or the accuser and that she had an equal relationship to both.

"What I would like to say today is that now, after two years since Ajay’s conviction, my belief in his innocence is not nearly as strong as it was then—it is in fact infinitely stronger," she said.

She discussed painstakingly going through the entire 10,000 page court transcript.  She said, "What became more apparent with my personal investigation into the evidence and the entire court case was simply astounding.  The prosecution’s case was not supported by actual evidence and in fact was proven to be false upon closer examination of the evidence."

"Their presentation of the evidence to the jury was blatantly inappropriate and misrepresented," she added.

While noting the lies and inconsistencies, she asked, "Wouldn’t that suggest to a trained investigator, or prosecuting attorney that she may not be telling the truth?  Shouldn’t that send up a red flag and warrant further investigation, like talking to those who knew her, and ESPECIALLY the IN-LAWS who would have nothing to gain by supporting a guilty man? "

She pointed out that in hundreds of private email communications between Mr. Dev and the accuser, there was "not ONE, and I mean not ONE insomuch as hinted of any inappropriate act, acts or relationship between the two.    Over the course of 4 ½ years, not one reference to anything sexual or untoward between the two of them, in what they believed were private conversations."

"Ajay IS innocent," she declared.

There was also anger

As a family friend, Tom Grothe, passionately told the audience, "A crime has been committed and a man sits in jail.  But the crime that was committed is not what the man sits in jail for."

Instead, the crime was committed by the "caretakers of justice" who have "betrayed that justice for the gamesmanship of their political payoff."

"When you have a justice system when the people that operate in it try to prove their importance to people in the society by committing acts of injustice - then you no longer have a justice system you have a legal system.  That's what you've got in Yolo County."

"You don't have a justice system when DA's get promoted based on their convictions," Mr. Groethe added.  "You don't have a justice system when the way that they pad funding to their department is based on those conviction rates."

"You'll never find a better example of cash for convictions than in the case against Ajay Dev," he said.

In a letter from Ajay Dev, he told family and friends, "My faith carries me forward until I hit my wall of fear. I have been cruelly forced into this horrible situation. But we are paving the way for so many people who have been or someday will be wrongly accused and unjustly convicted."



"The District Attorneys are so well connected that they feel as if they’re invincible. It is blatantly clear that there is no real oversight for DAs in our judicial system. So the only way to keep justice alive in the community is through the media and public outcry," he added.

"June 25, 2009, the day of my verdict, I broke down and cried as I was taken away from my wife, my child, my family, friends and all I hold so close to my heart. What happened that day devastated me beyond belief," he wrote.  "I am still trying to lift myself out of a cloud of depression and unhappiness, and crushed hopes and dreams."

He spoke of longing to hold his small children, including their son that was born after his sentencing had occurred.

Mr. Dev has been moved to Mule Creek State Prison, where he continues to serve his 378 years in prison.

---David M. Greenwald reporting