By Philip Sean Curran, Staff Writer
Criminal charges were dismissed Friday against a former University Medical Center of Princeton employee whom authorities failed to convict of committing sex crimes on two female patients.
Edher Osorio stood trial in May and October, both times resulting in mistrials due to hung juries. Middlesex County Superior Court Judge Bradley J. Ferencz, sitting in New Brunswick, concluded that a third trial would have produced the same outcome.
"I don’t see a different jury doing anything different," he said in dismissing an indictment charging Mr. Osorio, 32, with second-degree sexual assault and two counts of fourth-degree sexual contact. He had faced up to 10 years in prison on the second-degree charge.
Mr. Osorio left the courtroom declining to comment.
"I don’t want to say anything," said Mr. Osorio, who never testified at either trial.
The Prosecutor’s Office has 10 days to appeal the judge’s ruling.
"I don’t know what we’re doing," said Assistant Middlesex County Prosecutor Lynn Pilone immediately afterward.
Gregory Jordan, Mr. Osorio’s public defender, had no comment.
Friday’s ruling was the latest in a nearly two-year-old court case in which Mr. Osorio’s freedom hung in the balance.
He was arrested on Nov.24, 2012, at his home in Princeton and charged with sexually assaulting a 36-year-old patient in June 2012 and then making sexual contact on a 60-year-old patient on Nov.23 of that year. In both cases, the women had been brought to the emergency room, where he had worked as a technician.
A Middlesex County grand jury, in February 2013, handed up a three-count indictment against him. Yet at the two trials this year, juries found themselves deadlocked. That was a point Judge Ferencz touched on in making his decision. He had presided over the second trial, in which the jury said after only roughly 90 minutes of deliberations, it could not reach a unanimous verdict.
Mr. Jordan, during oral arguments before the judge on Friday, said the Prosecutor’s Office should not be allowed to try Mr. Osorio a third time. He tried to bolster that argument by pointing out that the two alleged victims had been under the influence of medications at the time. One of the victims, he added, had had three to four glasses of wine as well.
When it was her turn, Ms. Pilone said the case deserved to reach a verdict.
"What would be different?" the judge asked her at one point. Though acknowledging there would be no new evidence, she said her office had "a duty to protect its citizens."
The judge agreed that the allegations — of a health care worker taking advantage of two patients in a hospital — carried significant gravity. He said there is no prohibition against three trials. And even though he said the case should be retried, he said the result would be the "same" as the first two trials.
