People v. Golden, 03CA0191.
| Decision Date | 10 March 2005 |
| Docket Number | No. 03CA0191.,03CA0191. |
| Parties | The PEOPLE of the State of Colorado, Plaintiff-Appellee, v. Calvin Stewart GOLDEN, Defendant-Appellant. |
| Court | Colorado Court of Appeals |
John W. Suthers, Attorney General, John D. Seidel, Assistant Attorney General, Denver, Colorado, for Plaintiff-Appellee.
David S. Kaplan, Colorado State Public Defender, Douglas D. Barnes, Deputy State Public Defender, Denver, Colorado, for Defendant-Appellant.
Defendant, Calvin Stewart Golden, appeals from the judgment entered on a jury verdict finding him guilty of sexual assault through application of force or violence and sexual assault by means calculated to cause submission against the victim's will. We reverse and remand for a new trial.
According to the prosecution's version of the events, the female victim, then seventeen years old, was living with two men and another woman in a residence managed by defendant. Late one evening, defendant informed the residents by telephone that one of them would have to sign a lease. Defendant went to the residence shortly thereafter without the lease and contacted the victim, who voluntarily accompanied him back to his residence to sign the lease. During the trip back to the victim's residence, defendant sexually assaulted the victim in his automobile.
Defendant then drove her home and told her that she did not have to worry about paying rent and that she should not tell anybody about what happened. When she arrived home, she collapsed and informed her roommates that she had been raped. A subsequent medical exam revealed minor vaginal injuries, and a DNA comparison confirmed that semen samples found inside her were from defendant.
Defendant was charged with one count of sexual assault by causing submission through means reasonably calculated to cause submission against the victim's will, a class four felony, and one count of sexual assault with an aggravating circumstance of causing submission through application of force or violence, a class three felony, under § 18-3-402(1)(a), (4)(a), C.R.S.2004.
At trial, defendant did not deny that he had sexual contact with the victim; his theory of defense was that the sexual contact was consensual. Defendant did not testify and sought to establish his defense through cross-examination.
A jury convicted defendant of both counts, and he was sentenced to a term of sixteen years to life in prison under the Sex Offender Lifetime Supervision Act (SOLSA), § 18-1.3-1001, et seq., C.R.S.2004 (formerly § 16-13-801, et seq.). This appeal followed.
Defendant first contends that the trial court erred in limiting his cross-examination of the victim by excluding under § 18-3-407, C.R.S.2004, the rape shield statute, an inquiry into whether she was in a "committed romantic relationship" with a roommate at the time of the alleged assault. The purpose of the inquiry was to establish that the victim had a motive to lie concerning whether the sex was consensual. We agree.
Section 18-3-407 reads in pertinent part:
(1) Evidence of specific instances of the victim's or a witness' prior or subsequent sexual conduct, opinion evidence of the victim's or a witness' sexual conduct, and reputation evidence of the victim's or a witness' sexual conduct shall be presumed to be irrelevant except:
(a) Evidence of the victim's or witness' prior or subsequent sexual conduct with the actor;
(b) Evidence of specific instances of sexual activity showing the source or origin of semen, pregnancy, disease, or any similar evidence of sexual intercourse offered for the purpose of showing that the act or acts charged were or were not committed by the defendant.
(Emphasis added.)
At the close of a pretrial hearing, the following exchange occurred:
At trial, defense counsel mentioned in opening statement that the victim was in a committed romantic relationship with one of her three roommates at the time of the assault. Then, while cross-examining the victim, the following exchange occurred:
After this exchange, defense counsel requested a bench conference, at which the following was said:
....
On appeal, defendant argues, as he did in the trial court, that the victim's prior statements pertaining to her alleged committed romantic relationship had nothing to do with the victim's past sexual conduct, but rather, were relevant to the victim's motive to lie in telling the roommate, to whom she first reported the events, that she had been assaulted by defendant and the sexual contact was not consensual.
The essence of defendant's argument is that to avoid damaging her committed romantic relationship with her roommate, the victim told her roommate that defendant had assaulted her. Thus, defendant argues, the trial court's exclusion of the prior inconsistent statements concerning a committed romantic relationship constituted a violation of his right to confront witnesses against him under the federal and state constitutions.
The initial issue is whether evidence of the existence of a "committed romantic relationship" at the time of the alleged assault falls within the rape shield statute. The appropriate construction of a statute is a question of law. People v. Coleby, 34 P.3d 422 (Colo.2001). Our review of the trial court's interpretation of the statute is de novo. People v. Miller, 97 P.3d 171 (Colo. App.2003). In construing the rape shield statute, as with legislation in general, a court's primary task is to give effect to the intent of the legislature. In discerning legislative intent, we first look to the meaning of the words used in the statute, and if the language is not ambiguous, we rely on the plain meaning of those words. People in Interest of K.N., 977 P.2d 868 (Colo.1999).
The legislative purpose of the rape shield statute was set forth in People v. McKenna, 196 Colo. 367, 585 P.2d 275 (1978). The court stated:
The basic purpose of section 18-3-407, therefore, is one of public policy: to provide rape and sexual assault victims greater protection from humiliating and embarrassing public "fishing expeditions" into their past sexual conduct, without a preliminary showing that evidence thus elicited will be relevant to some issue in the pending case. The statute represents one means chosen by the general assembly to overcome the reluctance of victims of sex crimes to report them for prosecution. Thus it reflects a major public policy decision by the general assembly regarding sexual assault cases. In effect the legislature has declared the state's policy to be that victims of sexual assaults should not be subjected to psychological or emotional abuse in court as the price of their cooperation in prosecuting sex offenders.
This statute represents the Colorado General Assembly's response to a national trend which began in 1974 to reform procedures governing state prosecutions of various sexual assaults. These reforms constitute legislative recognition of the changing perception of rape as, not primarily a sex offense, and certainly not a crime of passion, but rather a hostile crime of violence and domination "calculated to humiliate, injure and degrade the female."
People v. McKenna, supra, 196 Colo. at 371-72, 585 P.2d at 278 (footnotes omitted); see also People v. Murphy, 919 P.2d 191 (Colo. 1996); People v. Braley, 879 P.2d 410 (Colo. App.1993).
Neither the General Assembly nor our courts have defined the term "prior or subsequent sexual conduct." People v. Gholston, 26 P.3d 1 (Colo.App.2000). However, our supreme court, in People v. Murphy, supra, has held that sexual conduct includes sexual orientation.
In People v. Murphy, supra, both the defendant and the victim were male. There, as here, the defendant's theory of defense was consent. The defendant sought to cross-examine the victim on his sexual orientation after he had testified that he had a wife and child and that his contact with the defendant was "sick and abnormal." The defendant...
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