Albany Today

By Linda (Linjun) Fan

A preliminary hearing of Kay Sorg‘s case, which had originally been scheduled for last week, was postponed to Nov. 20.

The upcoming hearing will center on several letters Sorg wrote to the accuser, who was a former student in her science class at Albany Middle School, in the early 1990s.

Three people have said they had seen the letters in interview with Albany Police. Two are the accuser’s friends back in school years. The other is her father, Mr. Doe.

According to the transcripts of the police interviews, both friends of the accuser said the letters showed that Sorg and the accuser had an intimate relationship, but there was not sexually explicit content in them.

However, Mr. Doe said the letters were “very suggestive”. He believed they were essentially “love letters”, and one of them referred to Sorg performing oral sex on his daughter.

Sorg’s defense attorney Elizabeth Grossman denied the accusation in a paper she submitted to the court.

“…defendant asserts that the letters were not ‘love letters’ at all, but merely reflected the friendship between her and Jane Doe, and that none of the letters referenced any sexual conduct whatsoever, ” Grossman wrote.

The letters’ whereabouts is unclear. The prosecutor said the accuser gave the letters back to Sorg after her father found out about them, whereas Sorg’s attorney said the letters were lost or destroyed while in the custody of the accuser or her father.

On the upcoming hearing, the Alameda County Superior Court will decide whether the testimony of the three witnesses describing the content of the letters could be admitted as independent evidence that corroborates the accuser’s allegations.

Defense Attorney Grossman had filed a motion to dismiss the case in the spring, but the court has postponed hearing the motion several times. And the prosecuting attorney of the case has changed person twice in the past year.

The current prosecutor, District Attorney Daniell Hilton, said she asked to court to put off the hearing to November because she is busy with another case.

Sorg is charged with sexual offenses on a minor, which the prosecutor said took place on May 30, 1991 and May 16, 1992, when the alleged victim was 14 and 15 years old.

In October of 2006, the accuser reported to William Wong, former Superintendent of Albany Unified School District, that she and Sorg had a sexual relationship when she was in high school.

“Jane did not want any money nor did she want the defendant to go to jail. She simply thought it was important that given the defendant’s conduct with her, the defendant should not be allowed to work with children, ” wrote the prosecutor in a court paper.

Wong reported the information to Albany Police Department, which arrested Sorg in May, 2007.

Most cases would have run out of the statute of limitations if the alleged crime took place more than 15 years ago. But in Sorg’s case the prosecutor invoked Penal Code section 803 (f) , which states that the time limitations may not be applied to sexual offenses on minors .

However, to prosecute such cases, there needs to be “admissible evidence that clearly and convincingly corroborates the accuser’s claims” .

The defense attorney and the prosecuting attorney will debate in court whether testimony of the letters by the three witnesses constitutes such evidence next month, if the hearing is not postponed again.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 22nd, 2008 at 8:32 pm and is filed under Issues of Concern, People in Albany. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.