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She was 3 then, a little girl dressed in a purple-flowered chiffon dress and nothing else.

She had blood on her dress and between her legs. She had rips and redness and bruises in places no child should ever be touched.

"Sylvia," she said from the hallway of a Southeast Heights apartment where during the Memorial Day weekend in 2006 the adults reportedly drank themselves into oblivion, "I'm hurting down here."

Sylvia Chavez was one of the only adults awake in the middle of that day, according to court records. Other children in a back bedroom laughed at cartoons on TV. The girl's uncle slept in another bedroom. Her grandfather was out cold on the living room floor. Another man was sprawled on a couch.

A fourth man, Rodney Davis, walked into the hallway smiling.

"That man," the girl told Chavez, "hurt me down there."

That man, it would be easy to surmise, was Davis, the soft-spoken son of perennial legislative candidate Harold Davis de Garcia.

That man, it would be easy to believe, is guilty of criminal sexual penetration of a minor and child abuse. That's what prosecutors expect to prove at a trial that began in state District Court in Albuquerque on Wednesday.

But like so many child rape cases — heck, like so many cases — it's not always easy to decide what is the truth.

Let's start with the words of the little girl, the key to the prosecution's case but which defense attorney Raul Lopez said were not disclosed to authorities until last month — nearly two years after the May 29, 2006, incident.

Chavez, the woman who found the girl, initially did not cooperate with Albuquerque police, Lopez said at the pretrial hearing. She gave a different statement, didn't know anything about what happened and was belligerent, he said.

Chavez, like the other adults in the apartment on Rhode Island Street Southeast, had consumed "enormous amounts of alcohol" — enough to pass out and be unable to remember details, Lopez said.

Chavez denied that at a pretrial hearing Wednesday, testifying that she drank just two beers in about six hours. But Deputy District Attorney Lisa Trabaudo said later she will not challenge the assertion that the adults were highly intoxicated.

Chavez's testimony is key because she is apparently the only one who heard the girl say those incriminating words.

Others who interviewed the girl that day, including an Albuquerque police detective, were expected to testify that the girl was nearly nonverbal, hardly able to formulate the words Chavez attributes to her.

The girl herself is not expected to testify, so jurors will not hear how she speaks or whether she can confirm that "that man" was Davis, now 27.

Davis' attorney has argued that not having the girl there is a violation of his client's Sixth Amendment right to confront his accuser, but the case goes forward under legal exceptions too complex to explain here.

And it must be said that of the people partying in the apartment that weekend, Davis was the only nonrelative or close friend in the bunch.

Meanwhile, jurors, at the request of Davis' attorney, will not hear how Davis was severely beaten by Chavez and two of the men. Attorney Lopez said during the hearing that he was afraid jurors would consider the beating an indication of Davis' guilt.

They also won't hear that, save for a drunken-driving charge in 2002, court records show Davis has never exhibited a predisposition to crime, deviance or untoward behavior around children.

They will, though, have to weigh testimony that shows DNA testing revealed no link to Davis and that the man on the floor, identified as the girl's grandfather, left the apartment before police arrived and was never interviewed. A detective testified she was not aware there was a fourth man in the room.

All this to say, a juror's job isn't easy.

No one wants to see a pedophile who savages children walk free. But no one should want to send an innocent man to prison, either.

Jurors will decide that.

The precarious balance between the rights of the victim and the rights of the defendant, no matter how earnestly sought, often looks cockeyed to those who sit on either side of the courtroom.

Perhaps the only sure thing in this case is that something unforgivable happened to the little girl in the chiffon dress. Whether or not justice is done in her case, the little girl, wherever she is, will have to live with that forever.