State v. Canton

• Decision Date: 23 July 2013
• Docket Number: No. 20110835.,20110835.
• Citation: 308 P.3d 517,739 Utah Adv. Rep. 11
• Parties: STATE of Utah, Plaintiff and Appellee, v. Reinaldo CANTON, Defendant and Appellant.
• Court: Utah Supreme Court

308 P.3d 517

739 Utah Adv. Rep. 11

STATE of Utah, Plaintiff and Appellee,

v.Reinaldo CANTON, Defendant and Appellant.

No. 20110835.

Supreme Court of Utah.

July 23, 2013.

John E. Swallow, Att'y Gen., John J. Nielsen, Asst. Att'y Gen., Salt Lake City, for appellee.

Peter Daines, Salt Lake City, for appellant.

Justice LEE authored the opinion of the Court, in which Chief Justice DURRANT, Associate Chief Justice NEHRING, Justice DURHAM, and Justice PARRISH joined.

Justice LEE, opinion of the Court:

¶ 1 Reinaldo Canton was arrested in Utah in April 2007 and indicted on federal charges of coercion and enticement of a fifteen-year-old girl. Canton, a New Mexico resident, was released and returned to New Mexico to await trial. He remained there pending trial for over two years, though he returned to Utah on a few occasions to attend proceedings in federal court. After the federal charges were dismissed in May 2009, Canton was charged by the State of Utah with enticement of a minor under Utah Code section 76–4–401.

¶ 2 Canton moved to dismiss the charge based on the applicable two-year statute of limitations. In so doing, he disputed the applicability of our criminal tolling statute, which tolls the limitations period while a criminal defendant is “out of the state.” SeeUtah Code § 76–1–304(1). In Canton's view, this provision was inapplicable because he was “legally present” in Utah during the course of the federal court proceedings, in that he cooperated with federal authorities and appeared in various proceedings in the federal district court. Canton argued in the alternative that application of the tolling provision violated the Uniform Operation of Laws provision of the Utah Constitution. The district court denied Canton's motion. Canton filed this appeal.

¶ 3 We affirm. The criminal tolling statute applies to Canton because its text leaves no room for his notion of “legal presence.” And applying the statute to Canton does not run afoul of the Uniform Operation Clause, as Canton fails to show how any classification under the statute discriminates against him in an impermissible manner.

I

¶ 4 In March 2007, Reinaldo Canton, a New Mexico resident, began corresponding online with an undercover federal agent posing as a fifteen-year-old girl. Canton engaged the agent in sexually-explicit conversation and ultimately arranged to meet the “girl” for sex at the Layton Hills Mall in Utah. When Canton arrived at the mall on April 11, 2007, FBI agents and representatives of the Utah Internet Crimes Against Children Task Force arrested Canton. Soon thereafter, federal officials charged Canton with coercion and enticement for illegal sexual activity under 18 U.S.C. § 2422(b). On April 19, 2007, a federal magistrate in Utah released Canton and allowed him to return to New Mexico to await trial on the federal charges.

¶ 5 During the course of the next fifteen months, federal officials in New Mexico monitored Canton and reported to their counterparts in Utah. Canton cooperated with the investigation against him and traveled several times from New Mexico to Utah to attend proceedings in federal district court. On July 29, 2008, Canton suffered an aortic dissection (a tear in a large blood vessel branching off of the heart), which required surgical intervention. Thereafter, Canton claimed he was too ill to continue traveling to Utah and filed a motion to dismiss based on his deteriorating health. The federal court granted this motion without prejudice on May 14, 2009.

¶ 6 Less than two months later, on June 30, 2009, the State of Utah charged Canton with enticement of a minor under Utah Code section 76–4–401. The state charge was based on the same 2007 conduct that led to the filing of federal charges.

¶ 7 Canton moved to dismiss under the two-year statute of limitations applicable to the enticement charge, Utah Code section 76–1–302. The district court denied the motion, concluding that the limitations period had been tolled under Utah Code section 76–1–304(1) because Canton had been “out of the state” in New Mexico during the course of the federal prosecution against him. In denying the motion, the district court rejected Canton's assertion that his “legal presence” in Utah foreclosed application of the tolling provision. It also upheld the applicability of that provision against Canton's challenge under the Uniform Operation Clause of the Utah Constitution. Canton entered a conditional guilty plea, reserving his right to challenge the application of the tolling statute on appeal.

II

¶ 8 Canton contends that the district court erred in applying our criminal tolling provision, which tolls the statute of limitations while a criminal defendant is “out of the state,” seeUtah Code § 76–1–304(1). While Canton concedes that he was in New Mexico during the course of the federal prosecution, he offers two grounds for overcoming the tolling provision. He first asserts that the tolling statute is inapplicable as long as a defendant maintains a “legal presence” within the state. In the alternative, he argues that application of the tolling provision violates the “uniform operation” of laws provision in article I, section 24 of the Utah Constitution.

¶ 9 Both points turn on questions of law, which we review for correctness. See Manzanares v. Byington ( In re Adoption of Baby B.), 2012 UT 35, ¶ 41, 308 P.3d 382, 2012 WL 4486225. We reject both of Canton's arguments and accordingly affirm.

A. Statutory Construction of “Out of the State”

¶ 10 Under our criminal tolling statute, “[t]he period of limitation does not run against any defendant during any period of time in which the defendant is out of the state following the commission of an offense.” Utah Code § 76–1–304(1). The question before us concerns the meaning of the phrase “out of the state.” Both sides agree that Canton was physically “out of the state” (in New Mexico) for most of the two years in which the limitations period is claimed to have run. Yet they disagree about the significance of that fact.

¶ 11 For the State, Canton's physical presence in New Mexico is dispositive, as it reads “out of the state” to refer to a defendant's absence from the state's territorial boundaries. Canton sees the matter differently. He interprets “out of the state” to refer to a more abstract construct. In his view a person is not “out of the state” if he is subject to its legal authority—in the sense of cooperating with federal officials investigating criminal charges in Utah and appearing at federal court proceedings there. Thus, for Canton the notion of “out of the state” refers not to the state's physical boundaries but its sovereign power. For him a person is not “out of the state” if he remains subject to its sovereign authority.

¶ 12 We read the statute as the State does. We interpret “out of the state” to focus on the question of a person's physical presence within the state's territorial boundaries. Thus, we reject Canton's abstract construct of legal presence, both as a matter of (a) the “ordinary meaning” of statutory language consisting of “common, daily, nontechnical speech,” Olsen v. Eagle Mountain City, 2011 UT 10, ¶ 9, 248 P.3d 465 (internal quotation marks omitted), and (b) under the possibility that the statute may employ a “legal term of art ... with a settled meaning in the law,” Hansen v. Hansen, 2012 UT 9, ¶ 19, 270 P.3d 531.

1. Ordinary Meaning of “Out of the State”

¶ 13 In determining the ordinary meaning of nontechnical terms of a statute, our “starting point” is the dictionary. See Hi–County Prop. Rights Grp. v. Emmer, 2013 UT 33, ¶ 19, 304 P.3d 851. “A dictionary is useful in cataloging a range of possible meanings that a statutory term may bear.” Id. (citing Henry M. Hart, Jr., Albert M. Sacks, The Legal Process: Basic Problems in the Making and Application of Law 1375–76 (William N. Eskridge, Jr. & Phillip P. Frickey eds., 1994) [hereinafter Hart & Sacks] ). “It provides ‘an historical record, not necessarily all-inclusive, of the meanings which words in fact have borne.’ ” Id. (quoting Hart & Sacks, at 1190). “Such a record, however, will often fail to dictate ‘what meaning a word must bear in a particular context.’ ” Id. (quoting Hart & Sacks, at 1190). “That question will often require further refinement—of selecting the best meaning among a range of options, based on other indicators of meaning....” Id.

¶ 14 This is one of those cases where the dictionary fails to dictate the meaning that the statutory terms “must bear” in this context. The operative phrase has two component parts—a function term (“out of”) and its object (“the state”). And dictionary definitions of both sets of terms leave the statute semantically open to both parties' interpretations.

¶ 15 The phrase “out of” is used “as a function word” in a range of different senses. Webster's Third New International Dictionary 1603 (2002). One sense “indicate[s] direction or movement from an enclosed space to the outside,” or “direction, motion, or distance from a ... starting point.” Id. To illustrate this meaning, the dictionary lists examples of a child who “fell out of the crib,” a person who “took his hands out of his pockets,” or one who “hit the ball out of the park.” Id. This sense of “out of” seems in line with the State's construction of the tolling statute. It connotes relational movement from a certain baseline, typically a physical one.

¶ 16 That said, this definition does not exclude the possibility of a metaphysical “space” or “starting point” from which something moves “out of.” And some common uses of the phrase unquestionably have an abstract referent. An argument can be “out of bounds” by dint of its exceeding the governing rules of propriety and not any physical boundary, just as a technical advancement can be “out of this world” in a figurative sense without the assistance of space travel. So this dictionary meaning of “out of” is itself insufficient to resolve the interpretive...