Kouts Clerk-Treasurer Greg Frame was found not guilty by a jury on Thursday of felony sexual misconduct with a minor.

Frame was charged in May 2009 after a man being investigated on child molesting charges by the U.S. Navy accused Frame of fondling him at a party at Frame’s house in March 2004, when the man was then 14.

Over the course of the next two years, the accuser alleged, he and Frame engaged in a sexual relationship which lasted until the summer of 2006.

Frame never denied the sexual relationship, his attorney, Larry Rogers, told the Chesterton Tribune today. But Frame disputed his accuser’s dating of that relationship and made his case to the jury that the relationship actually began after the boy turned 16, the legal age of consent in the State of Indiana.

Frame’s accuser was subsequently convicted of child molesting, Rogers said—Rogers called him a “sexual predator”—but no testimony to that fact was presented to the jury under Indiana’s rape shield law, which bans the introduction into a trial of an accuser’s sexual history.

In any case, Rogers said, the accuser proved not to be credible, as he provided different accounts of the events at different times. Initially the accuser told investigators that the relationship began when he was 14 but he testified on the stand that it started when he was 15, Rogers said. The accuser also told investigators early on that he and Frame had between 10 and 15 encounters but testified during the trial that the encounters numbered between 30 and 40.

Meanwhile, Frame’s wife testified that the accuser wasn’t at their home until fully a year after he said he was, Rogers said.

Rogers added that, although the accuser told investigators that he had been molested by two men, only one of them—Frame—was ever charged.

Posted 7/16/2010