Former hospital orderly Rudolph T. Johnson Jr., accused of raping two psychiatric patients at the University Medical Center last spring, pleaded guilty Wednesday to charges of aggravated sexual battery.
Johnson, 47, of Charlottesville, entered an Alford guilty plea in the case.
"An Alford plea is named for a Supreme Court case from the late 1960s," said Law Prof. Earl C. Dudley Jr. "It permits a defendant to plead guilty in the face of overwhelming evidence without actually admitting to having done it."
An Alford plea carries the same weight as a regular guilty plea.
"Ordinarily, when you plead guilty, you have to say 'I did it,'" Dudley said. "Under an Alford plea, you can say, 'There's a big overwhelming case against me and I'm likely to lose, so I want to plead guilty to reduce my charges.'"
State sentencing guidelines recommend that Johnson serve two to eight years in prison for the assaults. However, the guidelines are not binding. Each charge to which he pled guilty carries one to 20 years, and since he pled guilty to two of the charges, Johnson could receive anywhere from two to 40 years.
The state guidelines "give the judge sort of a better idea of what other courts in other similar situations might have done," Johnson's defense attorney J. Lloyd Snook III said.
The prosecution reached a plea agreement with Johnson to reduce allegations from two rape charges and one count of object penetration to two counts of aggravated sexual battery.
Going to trial is "always a risk with any case," Snook said. However, Johnson "had given a number of statements about things that turned out to be not true. Of course, so had some people who brought the case. It would have been an interesting battle of credibility."
Johnson, a patient care assistant in the psychiatric ward, was arrested May 15, 2001 and charged for two separate incidents of raping drugged female patients in their hospital beds last spring.
Johnson denied to the police that he had sex with the first woman and continued working in the psychiatric ward for almost two weeks afterward. A University police investigator testified at the preliminary hearing in August that Johnson admitted to having sex with the second woman.
At the time of the incidents, both women were under the influence of a drug combination of the tranquilizer Adivan and the sedative Ambien. Both testified in the August hearing that the incidents occurred during the hospital's night shift. The first woman was undergoing detoxification following a drug overdose and reported the incident April 30, 2001 the day after it occurred.
Forensic documents indicate that DNA extracted from semen found in one of the womenand on the other's bed sheet match Johnson's DNA.
The Johnson case spurred the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services to suspend funding to the hospital's psychiatric ward and place it on "immediate jeopardy" status, but removed the sanctions after corrective measures were taken at the hospital.
Johnson is scheduled to be sentenced June 26. He currently is being held without bond at the Albemarle-Charlottesville Regional Jail.
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