State v. Antle
| Decision Date | 28 March 2023 |
| Docket Number | WD83333 |
| Parties | STATE OF MISSOURI, Respondent, v. THOMAS EUGENE ANTLE, Appellant. |
| Court | Missouri Court of Appeals |
Appeal from the Circuit Court of Randolph County The Honorable Frederick P. Tucker, Judge
Before: Mark D. Pfeiffer, P..J, and Alok Ahuja and Karen King Mitchell, JJ.
Following a jury trial, Thomas Antle was convicted in the Circuit Court of Randolph County of one count of statutory sodomy in the first degree and one count of child molestation in the first degree. Both counts involved the same female Victim, who was three years old at the time.
Antle appealed. We held that the circuit court had applied an incorrect legal standard in determining that out-of-court statements made by the Victim to four adults were admissible under § 491.075.[1] State v. Antle, 657 S.W.3d 221 228-30 (Mo. App. W.D. 2021) ("Antle I"). Rather than reversing Antle's convictions, however, we remanded to the circuit court for a determination whether the Victim's statements were admissible when the proper legal standards were applied. Id. at 231-32.
On remand, the circuit court once again concluded that the Victim's extrajudicial statements satisfied the standards for admissibility under § 491.075. In his post-remand briefing in this Court, Antle does not challenge the circuit court's conclusion concerning the majority of the Victim's out-of-court statements. He does, however, ask us to reverse the circuit court's conclusion that the Victim's statements to a forensic interviewer, disclosing hand-to-genital contact, were admissible. These statements were the Victim's only disclosure of hand-to-genital contact, and constituted the sole support for Antle's conviction for first-degree child molestation.
We conclude that the circuit court did not abuse its discretion in finding the challenged statements admissible. We accordingly affirm Antle's convictions.
Our initial opinion describes the facts underlying Antle's convictions in detail. See Antle I, 657 S.W.3d at 225-27. We provide only a brief summary here.
Antle was charged and convicted of two sexual offenses against the female Victim, who was three years old at the time first-degree statutory sodomy (for putting his penis in the Victim's mouth): and first-degree child molestation (for touching her vaginal area through her clothes). Antle was acquitted of two counts of sexual abuse involving another minor female; those charges are not relevant to this appeal.
The Victim was eleven years old at the time of trial. She testified that she was not "able to remember today what happened to [her] when [she was] three."
The evidence supporting Antle's convictions came largely from the out-of-court statements Victim made to four adults her Father; her Grandmother; forensic interviewer Holly Calvert; and counselor Debbie Danner.
Prior to trial, the circuit court conducted a hearing pursuant to § 491.075 to determine the admissibility of the Victim's extrajudicial statements. The circuit court concluded that the extrajudicial statements bore "sufficient indicia of reliability" to be admissible under § 491.075.1(1). In making that determination, "the circuit court repeatedly stated that the only inquiry required by § 491.075 was whether the adult witnesses to whom Victim made disclosures were 'accurately repeating what the child said.'" Antle I, 657 S.W.3d at 228-29.
Based on the circuit court's pre-trial evidentiary ruling, the Victim's Father and Grandmother, as well as Danner and Calvert, were permitted to testify concerning the statements Victim had made to them concerning sexual abuse by Antle. The jury convicted Antle of both counts alleging sexual abuse of the Victim. The circuit court sentenced him to twenty-five years' imprisonment for statutory sodomy, and ten years for child molestation, with the sentences ordered to run consecutively.
Antle appealed. As relevant here, he argued that the circuit court had applied an incorrect legal standard in determining that the Victim's out-of-court statements satisfied the reliability standard of § 491.075. We agreed:
Id. at 228 (quoting State v. Thompson, 341 S.W.3d 723, 729 (Mo. App. E.D. 2011) (citations omitted)).
Besides finding that the circuit court had applied an erroneous legal standard, we also concluded that admission of the Victim's extrajudicial statements was "plainly prejudicial." Antle I, 657 S.W.3d at 231. We noted that "[t]here was no physical evidence corroborating Victim's accusations against Antle," and that "Victim failed to testify to any abuse by Antle whatsoever"; thus, "the only evidence of Antle's guilt came from Victim's out-of-court statements." Id.
On March 15, 2022, the circuit court held a further § 491.075 hearing on remand from this Court. At the hearing, the court heard live testimony from Holly Calvert, who conducted the Victim's forensic interview on October 11, 2011, and from Dr. Anne Duncan-Hively, a defense expert on forensic interviewing techniques. The court also received into evidence a number of exhibits, including a video recording of the Victim's forensic interview; anatomical diagrams labeled during that interview; and a transcript of the Victim's trial testimony.
Both the State and Antle submitted proposed orders to the court following the hearing. Notably, Antle's proposed order conceded that the statements made by the Victim to her Father, her Grandmother, her counselor Debbie Danner, and to Calvert concerning oral sex, were all sufficiently reliable to be admissible under § 491.075. Antle's proposed judgment would have found only that the Victim's disclosures to Calvert concerning hand-to-genital contact were unreliable, and therefore inadmissible.
The circuit court adopted the State's proposed order verbatim, and found all of the Victim's out-of-court statements to be reliable. The court's order, issued on March 28, 2022, found:
When considering the totality of the circumstances surrounding [Victim's] statements the Court finds that [Victim's] disclosure was spontaneous and consistently repeated, that there is no evidence before the Court that [Victim] was mentally unsound or that she had any motive to fabricate her story, that in describing Defendant's "thing" in her mouth, she demonstrated knowledge of subject matter unexpected in a child her age, that [Victim] spontaneously disclosed close in time to the abuse, and that none of [Victim's] statements were pressured or coerced.
The court accordingly found that "the time, content and circumstances of the statements made by [the Victim] . . . provide sufficient indicia of reliability pursuant to Section 491.075, RSMo," and were admissible given that the Victim herself testified at trial. The court's order specifically stated that "[t]he Court gives no weight to the testimony of Dr. Anne Duncan-Hively."
Notably, the court's order makes no specific mention of the Victim's statements that Antle had touched her vagina with his hand - statements which the Victim made only in her forensic interview with Calvert, and which were the only statements whose admissibility Antle continued to challenge. Several of the court's findings have no direct application to the Victim's disclosure of hand-to-genital contact, such as its findings: that the Victim's allegations were "consistently repeated"; that the Victim "spontaneously disclosed close in time to the abuse"; and that the Victim's description of oral sex "demonstrated knowledge of subject matter unexpected in a child her age."
Following entry of the circuit court's order on remand, Antle requested that we review it.
We review a circuit court's decision to admit testimony under § 491.075 for abuse of discretion. State v Hawkins, 604 S.W.3d 785, 791 (Mo. App. W.D. 2020). A circuit court abuses its discretion in admitting a child's out-of-court statements under § 491.075 when its...
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