Utah County prosecutors are feeling the aftershocks of a U.S. Supreme Court decision that forced them to drop remaining charges against a convicted sex offender who offered his home as a McGruff safehouse for children.

Prosecutors filed 11 charges against Carl Jensen, 40, of Orem in 2002. The state accused Jensen of sexually abusing or sodomizing six young relatives and neighbors, some incidents going back to the early 1990s.

Jensen pleaded guilty to many of the charges as part of plea agreements, and prosecutors dismissed other charges. He is in the Utah State Prison serving two life sentences on charges of attempted aggravated sexual assault of a child and sodomy of a child, plus up to 60 years on child sexual abuse charges.

Jensen was set to stand trial Monday and today on the remaining two charges concerning one victim — sodomy of a child, a first-degree felony, and sex abuse of a child, a second-degree felony.

The trial was canceled, though, and the charges will be dismissed, said prosecutor Mariane O’Bryant. That’s because the main evidence — a videotaped interview with the victim — can’t be used at trial.

“The family is pretty devastated,” O’Bryant said.

She sent the motion to dismiss to the court last week.

Defense attorney Richard Gale said the move wasn’t a surprise because of the U.S. Supreme Court case. Fourth District Judge Anthony Schofield ruled the victim would have to testify.

The U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Crawford vs. Washington in March that videotaped or taped evidence can’t be used in court unless the person on the tape is available for cross-examination.

The Constitution guarantees the right to confront witnesses, and a court can’t allow taped evidence based on a reliability test used by courts across the country since a 1980 U.S. Supreme Court ruling.

In the Jensen case, the remaining victim is too traumatized to testify in court, O’Bryant said.

Jensen is already in prison and will be there a long time, so the dismissal won’t have much of an effect, Gale said.

The Jensen case may not be the only Utah County case affected by the U.S. Supreme Court decision, but there won’t be many, O’Bryant said. If a victim can testify, prosecutors can used taped interviews.

“Every prosecutor in the country is scrambling to figure out what this means to us,” she said.

Amie Rose can be reached at 344-2530 or arose@heraldextra.com.

This story appeared in The Daily Herald on page D1.