Commonwealth v. Chilcoff
| Docket Number | 22-P-583 |
| Decision Date | 02 August 2023 |
| Parties | COMMONWEALTH v. RYDER CHILCOFF. |
| Court | Appeals Court of Massachusetts |
Heard: May 9, 2023.
Indictment found and returned in the Superior Court Department on March 7, 2018. A pretrial motion to suppress evidence was heard by Richard J. Carey, J., and the case was tried before him.
Ashley P. Allen for the defendant.
Bethany C. Lynch, Assistant District Attorney, for the Commonwealth.
Present: Sacks, Shin, & D'Angelo, JJ.
D'ANGELO, J.
A jury in the Superior Court convicted the defendant of rape, in violation of G. L. c. 265, § 22 (b). The charge stems from an encounter between the victim and the defendant, Ryder Chilcoff, when the victim entered the defendant's dormitory room. The victim was unsteady, wobbling, stumbling, and was confused as to whose room she was in. After being in the room for some time, the victim took the defendant's hands and rubbed them on her chest and vaginal area. The defendant asked the victim what she wanted to do, and she replied, "I want you" and "I want to stay here." The defendant thereafter had sexual intercourse with the victim.
At trial, the defendant requested a jury instruction what he labels as a mistake of fact, asserting that he actually and reasonably believed that the victim was capable consenting to the intercourse. See Commonwealth v. Lopez, Mass. 722, 725 n.2 (2001) ("we refer to the defendant's proposed instruction of a reasonable and honest belief as to consent as a 'mistake of fact' instruction"). The request was denied.
The defendant challenges his conviction on the following grounds: (a) his motion to suppress his statements should have been allowed; (b) his motion for a required finding of not guilty should have been allowed because there was insufficient evidence presented that the victim was incapable of consenting because of intoxication; (c) the judge erred by excluding evidence that deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) testing on the underpants that the victim was wearing during her examination by a sexual assault nurse examiner (SANE) five days after the rape showed the presence of another person's sperm; (d) the judge incorrectly excluded text messages between the victim and her sister about the victim blacking out in the past; and (e) the jury instructions were insufficient on the issue of the defendant's belief as to the victim's capacity to consent. We affirm the defendant's conviction.
The jury could have found the following facts. The defendant and the victim were both undergraduate students at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst in 2017. The victim lived in in a particular dormitory, and the defendant's room was directly above the victim's. On December 8, 2017, the victim attended a "pregame" party at approximately 9:15 P.M. where she drank four to six "nip" bottles of ninety-nine proof vodka within thirty minutes. She also "shot gunned" a can of beer and consumed additional amounts of beer while playing a drinking game.[1] The victim and her friends then left the party to go to a fraternity house. The victim was "stumbling . . . drunk" and "wobbling." The victim did not remember leaving the party; the last thing she remembered was playing the drinking game.
After she left the fraternity house, fellow students offered to help her go back to her dormitory because they did not believe she was in any condition to be walking alone. They described the victim as unsteady on her feet, slurring her words, and unable to walk a straight line. The victim had to hold on to someone for support and was not making sense when she spoke. The fellow students walked the victim back to her dormitory and watched her go inside and get through the security process. The victim went to the wrong floor of the dormitory and entered the defendant's room, which was directly above her own room. The defendant was with his roommate and his roommate's friend (friend) watching a movie; none of them knew the victim. After they told her she was in the wrong room, the victim stroked the friend's face with her hands and then left the room, at which point, the friend said, "Wow that girl is drunk." The defendant was present when the friend made this statement.
A short time later, around midnight, the victim came back into the room, took off her shirt, and got into the defendant's bed. The victim told the defendant, his roommate, and the friend that she lived in the Sylvan residential area, which is on the other side of campus, and was in this dormitory looking for her friend. She also said that she did not know where she was and then upon being asked if she knew what room she was in, gave her own room number rather than the number of the room where they in fact were. She was unsteady and wobbling, and her speech was slurred. While she was in the defendant's bed, she spilled water on herself, and then fell asleep and was snoring. The defendant's roommate thought she was so intoxicated that he feared she would vomit on the defendant's bed.
A short time later, in the presence of the defendant's roommate, the victim took the defendant's hands and rubbed them on her chest and vaginal area. The defendant asked the victim what she wanted to do, and she replied, "I want you" and "I want to stay here." The defendant's roommate commented, "just because she's saying it doesn't mean it's okay." The roommate also asked the defendant if he should get the resident assistant to help get the victim out of the room and the defendant declined the invitation. When the defendant's roommate asked what the defendant wanted him to do, the defendant responded by motioning for the roommate to leave the room, which the roommate then did. A short time later, the defendant had intercourse with the victim.
The defendant then sent his roommate a text message and apologized. When the roommate returned to the room, he heard the victim snoring; both he and the defendant also went to sleep. The defendant left the room in the early morning hours to catch a bus to New York City for a preplanned visit. The victim woke up later that morning in the defendant's room with no memory of any of the events of the previous evening after leaving the pregame party and did not know where she was. While searching for her clothing, she and the defendant's roommate found a used condom; testing revealed both the defendant's and the victim's DNA. The victim did not find the underpants she had been wearing the previous night and never saw them again. The victim left the defendant's room and returned to her room one floor below. Her vaginal area was sore, she had chest pain, and she believed that someone had had sex with her while she was in the room upstairs.
During the police investigation, the defendant was questioned by the police and gave an audio-recorded statement. The defendant admitted that the victim had entered his room and seemed to think that it was her room, but that after she made sexual advances toward him, they engaged in what he believed were consensual sexual relations. As we discuss later, prior to trial the defendant filed a motion to suppress the statement, which was denied. At the close of all the evidence, defense counsel requested a jury instruction that "[t]he defendant is not guilty of this crime if he actually and reasonably believed that the [c]omplainant was capable of consenting to sexual intercourse even if that belief was wrong." The judge declined to give the requested instruction, but instead instructed the jury substantially in accordance with the proposed jury instruction provided by the Supreme Judicial Court in Commonwealth v. Blache, 450 Mass. 583, 595 n.19 (2008), by instructing the jury that they "must consider whether the defendant actually knew or a reasonable person under the circumstances would have known that the complainant was unable to consent."
The defendant was convicted of rape and he timely appealed.
The defendant claims that the judge erred in ruling that the defendant was not in custody at the time of his interview by the police and therefore not entitled to Miranda warnings. "Miranda warnings are required only when a suspect is subject to custodial interrogation." Commonwealth v. Simon, 456 Mass. 280, 287, cert. denied, 562 U.S. 874 (2010). In assessing custody, "the court considers several factors: (1) the place of the interrogation; (2) whether the officers have conveyed to the person being questioned any belief or opinion that that person is a suspect; (3) the nature of the interrogation, including whether the interview was aggressive or, instead, informal and influenced in its contours by the person being interviewed; and (4) whether, at the time the incriminating statement was made, the person was free to end the interview by leaving the locus of the interrogation or by asking the interrogator to leave, as evidenced by whether the interview terminated with an arrest." Commonwealth v. Groome, 435 Mass. 201, 211-212 (2001). The Groome factors merely provide a framework for assessing the ultimate question: "whether the defendant was subjected to 'a formal arrest or restraint of freedom of movement of the degree associated with a formal arrest.'" Commonwealth v. Medina, 485 Mass. 296, 301 (2020), quoting Thompson v. Keohane, 516 U.S. 99, 112 (1995). In this case, all of the factors support the judge's conclusion that the defendant was not in custody at the time he spoke to the police.
When reviewing a ruling on a motion to suppress, we are bound by the judge's subsidiary findings of fact, unless they are clearly erroneous, but we conduct an independent review of the judge's ultimate findings and conclusions of law. See Commonwealth v. Tremblay, 480 Mass. 645, 652 (...
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