People v. Wilson

Decision Date21 October 2020
Docket NumberD074992
CourtCalifornia Court of Appeals Court of Appeals
Parties The PEOPLE, Plaintiff and Respondent, v. Luke Noel WILSON, Defendant and Appellant.

Charles M. Sevilla, San Diego, for Defendant and Appellant.

Xavier Becerra, Attorney General, Lance E. Winters, Chief Assistant Attorney General, Julie L. Garland, Assistant Attorney General, Arlene A. Sevidal and Andrew Mestman, Deputy Attorneys General, for Plaintiff and Respondent.

GUERRERO, J.

After the trial court denied his pretrial motion to suppress evidence obtained without a warrant, a jury convicted Luke Noel Wilson of one count of oral copulation of a child 10 years or younger ( Pen. Code, § 288.7, subd. (b) )1 and three counts of committing a lewd act upon a child (§ 288, subd. (a)), further finding true the allegations that two counts were committed against more than one victim. (§ 667.61, subds. (b), (c), and (e).) The court sentenced Wilson to an indeterminate prison term of 45 years to life.

Wilson appeals, contending (1) the trial court erred in denying his motion to suppress; (2) the evidence was insufficient to support his convictions under section 288, subdivision (a); (3) he was denied his due process right to notice of the nature of the charges against him; (4) the prosecution knowingly introduced false evidence at trial; (5) the prosecution failed to produce exculpatory evidence before trial in violation of Brady v. Maryland (1963) 373 U.S. 83, 83 S.Ct. 1194, 10 L.Ed.2d 215 ( Brady ); (6) the trial court's jury instructions and answers to jury questions were incomplete, misstated the law, and were unduly prejudicial; (7) prosecutorial misconduct and the court's failure to address the misconduct denied him his right to a fair trial; (8) the mandatory sentence was cruel and/or unusual as applied to Wilson; and (9) cumulative error. We conclude Wilson's contentions lack merit. Accordingly, we affirm the judgment.

FACTUAL BACKGROUND

For purposes of this section, we state the evidence in the light most favorable to the judgment. (See People v. Osband (1996) 13 Cal.4th 622, 690, 55 Cal.Rptr.2d 26, 919 P.2d 640 ; People v. Dawkins (2014) 230 Cal.App.4th 991, 994, 179 Cal.Rptr.3d 101.) Additional facts will be discussed where relevant in the following sections.

Using a website where women posted photos with the hopes of finding modeling and acting jobs, Wilson contacted an 18-year-old woman and hired her to pose for a photo shoot. The woman was fully clothed in the initial photo shoot, but over time Wilson persuaded her to first pose partially nude and, eventually, fully nude in hotel rooms after plying her with alcohol and paying her to pose.

The woman later introduced Wilson to her younger sister, J.A., who was only 15 years old at the time. Wilson paid the two sisters to pose, fully clothed, for photographs together in Balboa Park.

At the Balboa Park photo shoot, Wilson asked J.A. for her phone number and began contacting her separately from her sister. J.A. later agreed to another photo shoot, this time in a hotel room in lingerie. Thereafter, Wilson continued to send her "proposals" via e-mail, text message, or a texting "app" for photo shoots, detailing how much he would pay her to pose in certain ways. Over time, but while she was still a minor, Wilson progressed to paying J.A. to pose for nude and sexually explicit photos. Providing J.A. with alcohol to get her "more settled and calm," Wilson eventually paid J.A. to let him film her while he performed sexual acts and while she used sex toys on herself or allowed him to use the same toys on her body. These "photo shoots" occurred when J.A. was 15 or 16 years old. After the photo shoots, Wilson sent the photos to J.A., who testified that she liked the way she looked in the photos. By the time J.A. was 16 or 17 years old, Wilson was paying her to have sexual intercourse with him while he filmed the encounter. Occasionally, during photo shoots, Wilson would show J.A. child pornography.

When J.A. was 17, she became pregnant with her boyfriend (not Wilson). She gave birth to her daughter in late 2013, after she turned 18 and shortly after her high school graduation.

J.A. continued to do photo shoots with Wilson while she was pregnant. The photo shoots with Wilson, including nude photo shoots and filming during sexual acts, also continued after J.A. gave birth to her daughter. Around the same time, J.A. lost her job and was no longer working. She continued to accept payments from Wilson to perform in photo shoots, explaining that she could make the same amount of money in exchange for one photo shoot that she would earn working for two weeks at her previous part-time job.

Wilson later paid J.A. to send him a video of her having sex with her boyfriend. Over time, Wilson progressed to suggesting a proposal of paying J.A. to take photos of her touching her infant daughter. When her daughter was about nine months old, J.A. accepted a proposal from Wilson to pay her to take a photo with her hand on her daughter's buttocks and send it to him. Thereafter, Wilson offered to pay J.A. to send him photos or videos showing her orally copulating her daughter. J.A. again accepted the proposal and sent Wilson a minute-long video.

Wilson was also aware that J.A. often babysat her young cousin. Wilson began making offers to J.A. for her to touch her cousin in exchange for several hundred dollars. When the girl was about five years old, J.A. agreed to do so, sending Wilson photos of her touching her cousin's bare buttocks.

J.A. admitted to knowing at the time that what she was doing was wrong. Despite this knowledge, she continued to communicate regularly with Wilson without expressing any opposition. She admitted she never contacted the police, even after Wilson escalated to asking J.A. to perform and film sexual acts on minors. Instead of objecting, J.A. reacted with enthusiasm, responding to his proposals with e-mails full of exclamation points and frequently used the slang "lol," meaning "laugh[ing] out loud," in response to his extreme proposals. When Wilson asked her to perform oral copulation on two other minor girls, J.A. responded that she would do it and suggested, "Let's do [it] ASAP lol." Later, Wilson sent her photographs of a young girl that he wanted J.A. to perform with, to which J.A. responded "Lol aw she's soo small and cute lol."2

Several months later, J.A. declined Wilson's offers for additional photos of the young girls, claiming she felt guilty and was no longer comfortable with the idea. However, J.A. continued to communicate with Wilson up to the date of her arrest and participated in solo photo shoots for him.

In August 2015, J.A. was contacted by federal law enforcement and initially denied knowing Wilson or participating in his photo shoots. When confronted with the photos of her daughter, J.A. admitted the truth and began cooperating.

J.A. was initially charged with multiple offenses, but accepted a plea agreement wherein she pleaded guilty to four counts of felony child abuse (§ 273a, subd. (a)) and was sentenced to 10 years of probation.

As detailed ante , part of Wilson's course of conduct included offering to pay for photographs depicting lewd acts with minors, receiving the resulting photographs, and then distributing those photographs. Wilson used his "Gmail" e-mail account, hosted by Google, to communicate with the women. The Google Terms of Service specify that users may only use the Google services as "permitted by law."3 Google informs users that it "may review content to determine whether it is illegal or violates our policies, and we may remove or refuse to display content that we reasonably believe violates our policies or the law. But that does not necessarily mean that we review content, so please don't assume that we do."

Google, on its own initiative, took steps to ensure its systems were free of illegal content, particularly child sexual abuse material. Since 2008, Google has used a screening process utilizing a proprietary "hashing" technology to identify apparent child sexual abuse images on its services. Trained Google employees use software to generate a "hash" value for any image file they find depicting child pornography. The hash value is generated by a computer algorithm and consists of a short alphanumeric sequence that is considered unique to the computer file.4 ( Power of the Hash, supra , 119 Harv. L.Rev.F. at p. 39.) The resulting hash values are then added to a repository. The repository therefore contains hash values, not the actual child pornography images.

When a user uploads new content to its services, Google automatically scans and generates hash values for the uploaded files and compares those hash values to all known hash values in the repository. If Google's system detects a match between a hash value for uploaded content and a hash value in the repository for a file which was previously identified as containing apparent child pornography, the system generates a report to be sent to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC) in the form of a "Cybertip."5 In some cases, Google sends the report without opening the image file, while in other cases a Google employee opens the image for manual review to confirm it contains apparent child pornography.

In June 2015, Google's system identified four image files, each with hash values matching values for apparent child pornography images in its repository, attached to an e-mail created by the Gmail account later identified as belonging to Wilson.6 Google generated a Cybertip report to NCMEC identifying and forwarding the four image attachments. The report included only the four image files, not the e-mail body text or any other information specific to the e-mail. Google classified the images, using a common categorization matrix, as "A1," indicating they depicted prepubescent minors...

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