State v. Crippen
| Decision Date | 21 July 2016 |
| Docket Number | No. 20140051–CA,20140051–CA |
| Citation | 380 P.3d 18,2016 UT App 152 |
| Court | Utah Court of Appeals |
| Parties | State of Utah, Appellee, v. Matthew Alan Crippen, Appellant. |
Nathalie S. Skibine, Attorney for Appellant.
Sean D. Reyes, Salt Lake City, and Tera J. Peterson, Attorneys for Appellee.
1
Memorandum Decision
¶1 Matthew Alan Crippen appeals his convictions on two counts of forcible sodomy, first degree felonies, see Utah Code Ann. § 76–5–403(2), (4) (LexisNexis 2012), primarily on the ground that the testimony of the victim (Victim) was inconsistent to such an extent that Victim's account was inherently improbable and therefore could not be reasonably relied upon to convict him beyond a reasonable doubt. We affirm.
¶2 Although Crippen disputes the reliability of Victim's account of the events that precipitated this case, we recite the facts in the light most favorable to the jury verdict. See State v. Kruger , 2000 UT 60, ¶ 2, 6 P.3d 1116 ().
¶3 Crippen lived with Victim, her son, her sister, her grandmother, and another male. Victim's sister was Crippen's girlfriend. Victim suffers from apparent, but undiagnosed, intellectual disabilities. She also suffers from seizures, a condition that has precluded her from obtaining a driver license.
¶4 Two weeks after Crippen moved in with Victim and her family, Victim's sister asked Victim to accompany Crippen as he went to pay for a rental car. According to Victim, once they were at the rental car agency parking lot, Crippen asked Victim if she thought he was sexy, and when she said no, he pulled out his penis and told Victim to put it in her mouth. Crippen attempted to force his penis into Victim's mouth, but it touched only her lips. Victim then tried to exit the car, whereupon Crippen told Victim that he would drive her home. Instead, he drove to another location, took out his penis once more, and this time he succeeded in forcing it into her mouth, following which he ejaculated “a little.” Victim then wiped her mouth on her shirt.
¶5 After the assault was over, Crippen warned Victim “not to tell anybody” and to “keep quiet.” The very next day, however, Victim reported the assault to her sister and grandmother. When a police officer interviewed Victim, she gave the officer the shirt she had been wearing at the time of the assault. Later, she gave another officer a pair of boxer shorts that Victim believed belonged to Crippen and that Victim had collected two days after the assault.2 She told the police, as recounted by an officer at trial, that Crippen “forced her to perform oral sex on him in the vehicle at one of the places they stopped.” When an officer interviewed Crippen, he denied even knowing Victim or Victim's sister, his girlfriend.
¶6 Some time later, Crippen was jailed. While he was in jail, the State recorded a phone conversation between him and an unidentified woman in which he acknowledged having had oral sex with Victim. In Crippen's telephone account, Victim put her hand on his penis and referred to it as “a little one.” Crippen, “insulted” and “pissed,” told “this bitch” to “put [his penis] in [her] mouth.” Although Crippen claimed during the phone conversation not to have ejaculated, he expressed concern that his DNA might be found on Victim's shirt.3 He also denied that their sexual contact was forcible and said of Victim, “She's lying, she's probably not very good at lying, and so it probably won't go too far.”
¶7 Prior to trial, Crippen moved to exclude evidence of Victim's seizures and mental disability on the ground that introduction of such evidence would be unduly prejudicial to Crippen and unfairly cause the jury to feel sympathetic toward Victim. The State explained that it intended to introduce such evidence in order to “allow the jury to have a basis to determine whether she's even capable of consenting.” Because the State had not identified an expert to testify as to Victim's intellectual abilities and because the State did not provide sufficient advance notice to Crippen that it was going to pursue that argument, the trial court ruled that evidence of Victim's mental capacity could not be introduced. The trial court noted, however, that to the extent Victim's intellectual disability was “obvious, there might be some inference that the jury [could] make on its own.”4
¶8 Although not all aspects of Victim's trial testimony were consistent with the accounts she gave police, her testimony was consistent with her claim that Crippen sexually assaulted her at the rental car agency. She also testified to the assault at the second location—an accusation that the officers who interviewed Victim did not recall from their interviews with her. She further volunteered that she lacked a driver license due to seizures and that she had been raped many times before.
¶9 Defense counsel requested a mistrial after Victim's statement about her seizures and objected after her second reference to having been raped before, but the trial court declined to grant a mistrial because it concluded that the statements were of minimal impact and “would not garner any particular sympathy” for Victim given “the context in which [the statements] came out.” The trial court further concluded that none of these statements were prejudicial to Crippen, especially as the prior rapes were not attributed (or attributable) to him. The court did, however, give a curative instruction to the effect that the jury was “not [to] let any bias, sympathy or prejudice that [it might] feel toward one side or the other influence [its] decision in any way.”
¶10 In her cross-examination of Victim, defense counsel focused on purported inconsistencies between the various versions of Victim's story as shared with police, at the preliminary hearing, and at trial. When pressed, however, Victim maintained her basic story and suggested that perhaps the officers misunderstood her during her interviews because her apartment was very noisy during the interviews. On the ground that Victim's testimony was inherently improbable, Crippen moved the trial court for a directed verdict, which was denied.
¶11 After submission of the case to the jury, it returned a guilty verdict. Crippen appeals.
¶12 As we recently noted, “[a]s long as there is some evidence from which all the necessary elements of the charged offenses can be proved, there is sufficient evidence to find the defendant guilty beyond a reasonable doubt.” State v. Johnson , 2015 UT App 312, ¶ 11, 365 P.3d 730. Although this court will reverse a conviction where “the evidence [presented] is sufficiently inconclusive or inherently improbable that reasonable minds must have entertained a reasonable doubt that the defendant committed the crime of which he was convicted,” see State v. Hirschi , 2007 UT App 255, ¶ 16 n. 7, 167 P.3d 503 (alteration in original) (citation and internal quotation marks omitted), a “[d]efendant's personal view of events does not ... render the State's evidence sufficiently inconclusive or inherently improbable so as to warrant a reversal,” Johnson , 2015 UT App 312, ¶ 12, 365 P.3d 730 (citation and internal quotation marks omitted).
¶13 In judging whether testimony is inherently improbable, a witness's inconsistency is not dispositive.5 See State v. Marks , 2011 UT App 262, ¶ 79, 262 P.3d 13 (). See also State v. Phillips , 2012 UT App 286, ¶ 24 n. 7, 288 P.3d 310 () (citation and internal quotation marks omitted). Similarly, “the consideration of whether [a victim's] testimony is inherently improbable must be undertaken with [his or her intellectual] limitations in mind, lest we adopt a standard that leaves the most vulnerable victims of sexual abuse without recourse.” Marks , 2011 UT App 262, ¶ 78, 262 P.3d 13. See also State v. Adams , 955 P.2d 781, 783 (Utah Ct. App. 1998) (). Failure to allow for some inconsistency in the testimony of mentally challenged individuals would likely prevent any charges from being brought against abusers of such individuals. See Kate Stone Lombardi, Rape and the Mentally Retarded , N.Y. Times (July 25, 1993), http://www.nytimes.com/1993/07/25/nyregion/rape-andthe-mentally-retarded.html.
¶14 Much like the victim in Phillips, Victim's testimony was corroborated by other evidence. See 2012 UT App 286 ¶ 24, 288 P.3d 310. In Phillips, another case of sexual assault in which there was no DNA evidence, see id. ¶¶ 4–5, the victim's brother corroborated a statement made by the defendant, and police corroborated the victim's account of the physical condition of the defendant's room, id. ¶ 24. Here, Crippen himself acknowledged that he had engaged in oral sex with Victim in much the same manner as Victim alleged—aside from the question of consent.
¶15 We also note that in this he-said-she-said situation, Crippen's own credibility was severely compromised both by his initial denial to police that he knew Victim, much less his own girlfriend, and by the recording of his jailhouse phone call. As noted, Crippen lied...
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