Doctor acquitted of lewd act on a flight from Hawaii to Boston

A magistrate judge in Boston federal court ruled today that federal prosecutors failed to make their case that a local doctor committed a lewd act while seated next to a 14-year-old girl on a flight from Honolulu to Logan Airport in May, 2022.

Following a two-day trial that started Monday, US District Court Judge Donald Cabell acquitted Sudipta Mohanty of Cambridge, a primary-care physician at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, on a count of committing a lewd, indecent or obscene act.

Mohanty had asked for a trial in front of a judge rather than a jury.

Mohanty was arrested last August after the FBI and the US Attorney's office in Boston concluded it had enough evidence to prove that Mohanty had exposed himself and masturbated to completion as he sat between his sleeping girlfriend and the 14-year-old on a 9 1/2-hour red-eye flight on Hawaiian Airlines more than a year earlier.

Mohanty's lawyer, Claudia Lagos, however, charged that the girl never reported her story to anybody during the flight and that in the days and weeks to follow, she repeatedly changed just what that story was, changing from an initial report the man next to her was masturbating under a blanket to eventually saying he was exposed to her:

[T]he lack of trustworthiness is highlighted by the utter lack of corroborative evidence, despite the behavior allegedly taking place in a setting replete with witnesses. Every version of events by the complainant is different, each less likely than the next, increasing in untrustworthiness and striking lack of corroboration.

Also, Lagos argued the US Attorney's office in Boston withheld evidence that would have helped make the case that Mohanty did nothing improper until just before the trial's scheduled start: Statements from flight attendants that they had seen nothing untoward going on in their row during the flight.

In fact, she asked for the case to be dismissed even before trial because of this failure to provide such key evidence, collected in interviews by FBI agents, that she argued would have exonerated her client from the start:

Dr. Mohanty is profoundly prejudiced through the deprivation of this information at this juncture and his ability to interview, subpoena, and call essential defense witnesses has been irremediably impeded by the Government's misconduct. For the Government to minimize the significance of this information because of flight attendants' lack of observations about the alleged crime would miss the point. Dr. Mohanty has incurred tremendous loss because of this prosecution for a crime he has told law enforcement from the get-go that he did not commit. These vital witnesses did not see anything not because they were not looking, but because Dr. Mohanty never committed the acts alleged by the Government.

Cabell denied the motion - but also a government motion to introduce details of what the girl allegedly told family members - before conducting the trial.