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LAWRENCE, Kan. — A former University of Illinois basketball player accused of sexually assaulting a woman at a Lawrence bar can present evidence to suggest another patron at the bar may have committed the assault.
Terrence Shannon Jr. is set to go to trial today. He is currently free on a $50,000 bond.
District Court Judge Amy Hanley made the ruling after viewing a video that shows a man who previously had been accused of sexual assault being near the victim in the same small, crowded area of the bar at the time the assault was alleged to have occurred.
The name of the man was not revealed in court Friday. However, court records show that Shannon’s defense lawyers had recently requested and received police reports and an arrest affidavit related to former Kansas men’s basketball team member Arterio Morris. The defense later went on to describe previous criminal complaints filed against the unnamed man, and those complaints closely follow those made against Morris, including being on the same day, Aug. 26, 2023.
Shannon’s charging documents regarding the alleged assault list multiple former or current Kansas basketball players as having been at the bar at the time of the alleged assault.
Court records show three current or former Kansas men’s basketball players have been issued subpoenas and may be called as witnesses in the upcoming trial.
Shannon, 23, is charged in Douglas County District Court with one felony count of rape or, in the alternative, one felony count of aggravated sexual battery, according to charging documents.
His trial is expected to be followed nationally by sports media due to Shannon’s status as a top NBA prospect.
The incident is alleged to have occurred on Sept. 9, 2023, at the Jayhawk Cafe, 1340 Ohio St., while Shannon was in Kansas to attend the Illini’s football game at Kansas.
The woman testified in May that Shannon grabbed her by the bottom and violated her under her skirt.
Shannon’s attorney, Tricia Bath, of Leawood, argued on Friday that the unnamed third party may have been responsible for the alleged assault.
Bath said the third party is a possible suspect in the case because after reviewing surveillance video from the bar of the alleged incident, the third party is in the same 9-square-foot area of the crowded bar along the same 2-foot wall.
Bath said the third party’s presence near the woman is relevant because he was previously accused of a similar act less than two weeks earlier in the same Lawrence bar and in the same location within that bar.
In that alleged incident, the victim was wearing leather pants, and the sexual assault amounted to groping over the clothes, Bath said.
That allegation was never pursued by police, though, despite there being an affidavit filed with the DA’s office in support of the third party’s arrest, Bath said.
She said it may have been because the third party was accused of raping the woman later that night, and police may have focused on that incident instead.
She said that police the night of the incident involving Shannon knew that the third party was there and that he had been accused of a similar crime, but for whatever reason, they did not question the third party the night of the incident.
“(Police) failed to run down a witness who might have been a suspect,” Bath said.
Morris, 21, of Dallas, was eventually charged with rape in connection with the August incident, and those charges led to Morris’ dismissal from the men’s basketball team.
However, those charges were later dismissed due to insufficient evidence, as the Journal-World reported.
Bath, without mentioning Morris’ name, referred to a rape case matching that description and date on multiple occasions Friday.
That rape case and the incident described above in which a woman said she was groped over her clothes both happened on the same night and involved the same woman and the same suspect, and the defense says that suspect is the third party who was in the bar on the night that Shannon has been accused of sexual assault.
Bath, the attorney, said she does not intend to bring up the rape allegation in Shannon’s trial, only the allegations that occurred at the bar.
The state argued in a motion filed by Deputy District Attorney Joshua Seiden that the defense should not be allowed to present any evidence about the third party.
Seiden, in his written motion, said the allegations that the third party groped a woman at the same bar two weeks earlier are unrelated to the allegations against Shannon.
Seiden’s motion also noted that the alleged victim identified Shannon as the man who assaulted her, and the presence of the third party at the bar does nothing to diminish the validity of that identification.
Judge Hanley, though, ruled that that third party’s presence could be considered legally relevant to Shannon’s defense.
Hanley said that she had reviewed the video, and she found that the suspected third party’s presence in the same small area at the time of the allegations makes the introduction of the third party admissible.
