On February 26, 2010, police arrested 61-year-old Stanley Reynolds Jr. at his home in Waterville, Vermont on a charge of sexually assaulting his 29-year-old deaf niece, S.T. Reynolds admitted he had engaged in oral sex with S.T. on February 22 in the basement of his home while his wife was upstairs. He said the sex was consensual.
At the time, Reynolds operated a business called Streetbrook Wood Products that involved selling and delivering firewood to retail stores in northern Vermont. S.T. began working for him in 2005, bundling and delivering wood. She subsequently moved into a trailer on the property where Reynolds lived with his wife.
On March 3, 2011, he was charged with one count of sexual assault without consent.
Reynolds went to trial in Lamoille County Superior Court in March 2011. However, a mistrial was declared due to problems with sign language interpreters and a special camera system that allowed the words spoken to be translated into text and displayed on a screen.
Reynolds went to trial a second time in February 2012. Because he no longer had funds to keep his privately retained attorney, Reynolds was represented by Dan Maguire from the Vermont Public Defender’s Office.
S.T. testified through sign language interpreters that she had been held hostage by Reynolds in the basement on February 22, 2010, when he had oral sex with her. At the first trial, she had said she screamed for help and that although she had her cell phone with her, she was afraid to use it. In a pretrial deposition, she had claimed she only used the phone to play games.
In addition to sign language, her primary form of communication was by cell phone text. At the retrial, she said that Reynolds had taken it away from her and did not return it until sometime later.
The phone showed 37 texts had been made on February 22, 2010, from S.T.’s cell phone after the alleged assault while she was working with Reynolds, demonstrating, according to the defense, that she was not afraid of him. The prosecution contended that the texts were the result of “butt-dialing.”
S.T. insisted that she had never had sex with Reynolds in the past. “Never,” she said. “He’s my family. I never had sex with him.”
The defense contended the relationship was consensual, but no witnesses were called to support that claim. Reynolds’s wife, Mary, testified that S.T. had texted her at 12:10 p.m. on the day of the incident, and there was no indication of any sexual assault. Reynolds did not testify.
On February 17, 2012, the jury convicted Reynolds of criminal sexual assault. He was sentenced to five years to life in prison.
The Vermont Supreme Court affirmed the conviction and sentence on February 14, 2014.
Reynolds obtained a new attorney, Mark Kaplan, who filed a motion seeking a new trial. The motion claimed Reynolds had not received a fair trial because Maguire had failed to call witnesses, including family members and neighbors, who would have testified that S.T. and Reynolds were romantically involved prior to the alleged sexual assault.
Two days of hearings were held in September 2019 and January 2020. The defense presented evidence that although Reynolds’s wife was unaware, others observed Reynolds and S.T.’s closeness and suspected an affair. Reynolds had taken S.T. to his deer camp alone several times on a four-wheeler. Reynolds’s older brother, Steven had seen the two of them driving together and saw S.T. sitting extremely close to Reynolds on a full bench seat in the truck. He said he saw S.T. smiling at Reynolds and appeared to be unable to take her eyes off him.
He was so “sure” that something was going on between them that he had warned Reynolds. In 2008, Reynolds, according to Steven, admitted that he and S.T. were having sex and that it had been going for some time. Steven said he spoke disapprovingly to Reynolds on two subsequent occasions.
Reynolds’s other brother, Sidney, also had seen Reynolds and S.T. sitting close together. At one point, Sidney said that Reynolds asked him to leave the heat on at the family camp, presumably at a time he was planning to take S.T. there. Sidney said that he had told him, “I hope you’re not doing what I think you’re doing.”
Dorothy and Fred Fletcher lived about a quarter mile from Reynolds. They both said they had seen him and S.T. drive by several times on the four-wheeler with S.T.’s arms wrapped tightly around Reynolds. They believed that “something could be going on.”
The defense also said that Maguire had not sought to interview Tim Burton, someone who had dated S.T. Reynolds believed that Burton was the person that S.T. was texting on the day she made her allegation. Maguire did not interview Burton because he was concerned that such an interview might produce inculpatory evidence. Even so, Maguire had not taken any steps to recover the actual text messages. After the trial, Burton had been interviewed and admitted he received text messages from S.T. on that day, but said he did not remember the content.
In February 2019, Superior Court Judge Mary Miles Teachout denied the motion for a new trial. The judge noted that the transcript from the trial was not available. Still, she said, the evidence suggested that trial evidence on the issue of consent was provided in the form of testimony by Reynolds’s grandson that he knew his grandfather was having an affair.
“The evidence before this court from the [post-conviction hearing] is limited to that level of generality: it is unknown what the grandson’s testimony actually was,” Judge Teachout said. “Otherwise, on the issue of consent, trial counsel apparently sought to impeach the credibility of [S.T.] by questioning her vigorously on cross-examination about inconsistent testimony, but again, it is unknown to this court what the testimony actually was.”
“The court finds that additional evidence in the form of testimony from Mr. Reynolds’s brothers, both about the fact of a sexual relationship and the length and extent of it, and in the form of the Fletchers’ observations would have strengthened evidence showing that the sex that day was part of a pattern of a consensual sexual relationship that had taken place over years. Such additional testimony also could have made jurors more skeptical about her credibility and provided more material for trial counsel to challenge credibility on cross-examination. ”
And while the evidence “most likely would have provided more material for cross-examination and thus greater chances for Mr. Maguire to impeach [S.T.’s] credibility,” and therefore “would have improved the chances of acquittal,” the judge said that “whether it would have improved the chances of acquittal enough to make a difference cannot be determined from the evidence.”
“Without clear evidence of what happened at the trial, the court has no way to determine now whether the evidence of guilt was devastating and overwhelming and easily able to withstand some additional evidence favorable to the defense or whether it was scant and so close a call that any additional help for the defense may have made the difference,” Judge Teachout ruled.
The judge said a “speculative possibility” was not enough to grant a new trial.
The defense appealed.
On August 5, 2020, the Vermont Supreme Court reversed that ruling and vacated Reynolds’s conviction. The court had been provided a copy of the trial transcript. After reviewing it, the court said that Reynolds’s grandson did not testify that he knew Reynolds was having a sexual affair with S.T. prior to February 22, 2010, the date of the alleged assault. He only testified that he had learned of it by the time of the trial.
“Thus, there were no independent witnesses who testified about any knowledge before February 22, 2010, of whether Mr. Reynolds and [S.T.] had had an ongoing sexual relationship for a period of years,” the court declared.
“The entire case turned on the credibility of [S.T.],” the court said, noting that two experts had testified at the post-conviction hearing that had the Reynolds brothers testified at trial, it could have made a difference in the outcome, but the [trial] court previously could not evaluate those opinions because it did not have a trial transcript.”
“The trial transcript makes clear that the additional witnesses, who should have been discovered by trial counsel if preparation had been early enough and sufficient, would have provided testimony supporting the existence of a prior sexual relationship,” the court ruled.
On August 7, 2020, Reynolds was released from prison. On July 21, 2021, the prosecution dismissed the case.
Reynolds sought compensation from the state of Vermont, but his claim was denied.
On November 20, 2024, Reynolds died. He was 76.
– Maurice Possley
Posting Date: 07-07-2025
