State v. Hoffman

• Decision Date: 23 December 2021
• Docket Number: 20191048-CA
• Citation: 503 P.3d 538
• Parties: STATE of Utah, Appellee, v. Jayce Reid HOFFMAN, Appellant.
• Court: Utah Court of Appeals

503 P.3d 538

STATE of Utah, Appellee,

v.Jayce Reid HOFFMAN, Appellant.

No. 20191048-CA

Court of Appeals of Utah.

Filed December 23, 2021

Janet Lawrence, Attorney for Appellant

Sean D. Reyes and Karen A. Klucznik, Salt Lake City, Attorneys for Appellee

Judge Ryan M. Harris authored this Opinion, in which Judges Jill M. Pohlman and Ryan D. Tenney concurred.

Opinion

HARRIS, Judge:

¶1 Jayce Reid Hoffman placed a cell phone under the bottom of the bathroom door while his girlfriend's fifteen-year-old daughter (Sarah¹ ) was in the shower. For this and other acts, Hoffman was charged with voyeurism and attempted sexual exploitation of a minor. After a trial, a jury acquitted Hoffman of voyeurism but convicted him of attempted sexual exploitation of a minor. Hoffman now appeals that conviction, asserting that the trial court erred by denying his motion to suppress video evidence taken from his cell phone, and by denying his motion for directed verdict. We affirm.

BACKGROUND²

¶2 On the morning of December 17, 2018, after her mother (Mother) and older brother (Brother) had left the house to go to work, Sarah—who was fifteen years old at the time—took a shower before school. Upon exiting the shower, Sarah noticed that a cell phone was visible through the space between the floor and the bottom of the bathroom door, placed upside-down and resting against the outside of the door, with its top edge resting on the floor and its camera apparently trained to view into the bathroom from under the door.³ Sarah wrapped a towel around her and loudly asked, "Is that a camera underneath the door?" Moments later, someone lifted the phone off the ground and Sarah heard footsteps outside the bathroom. After dressing in her bedroom, Sarah was summoned into Mother's room by Hoffman—Mother's boyfriend—who not only admitted that he had placed a cell phone camera underneath the bathroom door, but also told Sarah that he "wanted" her and that he had been experiencing these feelings "for months." He told her that he had "peeked" in her bedroom window before, and he identified scars on her legs that he would not have known about had he not seen her without pants on. He also explained to Sarah that, because of his feelings for her, he had found it necessary to stop looking at pornography involving step-families because "it was tempting for him."

¶3 Hoffman himself acknowledged, in a subsequent interview with the police, that during this conversation he told Sarah that he viewed his "urges" for her as natural and "human" because Sarah was "50 percent [her] mother who [Hoffman] was in love with and attracted to." In that same interview, Hoffman admitted that he had placed a cell phone underneath the bathroom door while Sarah was in the shower, but he maintained that he had not taken any pictures or videos. He explained that he put the phone underneath the door, without activating its camera, to try to overcome his urges and give himself "a pat on the back afterwards" when he resisted the temptation to take photos.

¶4 After their discussion in Mother's room, Hoffman drove Sarah to school, where she began feeling "stressed" and "scared" and subsequently called Brother and asked him to come pick her up. Sarah told Brother what had happened, at which point they returned home and Brother confronted Hoffman and asked him to leave. Brother then called the police.

¶5 When the police arrived, the responding officer (Officer) took written statements from Sarah and Brother. In her statement, Sarah wrote:

My mother's boyfriend put his phone camera on the bottom of the door and took pictures or a video of me, naked, after the shower[.] After I walked out of the shower, I saw the camera and called it out! He then lifted it and walked off. He talked to me after about it and told me that he had desires to do it for 9 months and that he caught peaks [sic] of me naked and had a lot of chances to do something to me but he had control of it. He explained that he couldn't watch pornhub because the popular videos were all about step families[.] He suggested that my mother might've known[.]

In her statement, Sarah did not describe the phone she had seen underneath the door. After obtaining the witness statements, Officer took some photographs and left the scene.

¶6 Later that day, Officer was informed that Hoffman had returned to the house. When Officer arrived on scene, he had an interaction with Hoffman, which was recorded on Officer's body camera. During the interaction, Hoffman stated, in part:

But I was sitting there, like, head in my hands, like, why ... am I doing this? What is wrong with me? And I wasn't even paying attention to what was going on. And then I just heard her yell, "Is that a phone?" I was like, oh, oh, hey, stuff's happening. Grabbed the phone and chucked it. But, uh, it was just on the camera screen. It wasn't like—there's no pictures taken. There's no nothing.

(Emphasis added.) Officer then took Hoffman into custody and transported him to the police station for further questioning. At the station, officers found a gray LG-brand cell phone (the gray phone⁴ ) on Hoffman's person, and took possession of that phone.

¶7 After being advised of his right to remain silent, Hoffman assented to an interview—the same one already alluded to, supra ¶ 3—conducted by a police detective (Detective). During that interview, as noted, Hoffman admitted to placing a phone underneath the bathroom door during Sarah's shower, and offered his reasons for doing so, but denied taking any photos or videos.⁵ Hoffman also admitted to having seen Sarah naked on at least one occasion in the past, when she was lying on her bed with the blinds open and he was outside on the balcony smoking, although he claimed it happened accidentally. Near the beginning of the interview, in the context of explaining this earlier incident, and as he was describing the discussion he had with Sarah after she discovered the phone while getting out of the shower, Hoffman indicated—or at least strongly implied— that the phone he placed underneath the bathroom door was the gray phone:

And I explained a couple of things to [Sarah] before about why I had that urge [to photograph or record her] and about how you know she, without me even trying like, you know, naked stuff of her came up, right? I never was looking for it or anything. It just—in other situations it happened. You know, I was just trying to explain from those situations that happened, where the urge came from, but I didn't do anything. I didn't take a picture. You guys have my phone. It's not on it. There's, you know, no evidence whatsoever of anything.

(Emphasis added.) Hoffman told Detective that the phone he had used that morning was not "even in like photo screen" and "was just sitting there black," a claim that contradicted his statement, made earlier that same day to Officer, that his phone had been "just on the camera screen." Detective asked various follow-up questions, sometimes asking Hoffman to clarify where "your phone" had been placed, and Hoffman responded by describing where he had placed "my phone." Later in the interview, however, Hoffman told Detective that the phone he had placed underneath the bathroom door was not "my phone" but, instead, was "a spare dead" white HTC-brand phone (the white phone) that was "not even charged" at the time.

¶8 On December 18, 2018—the day after the incident and Hoffman's interview—a search warrant for the gray phone was approved, which authorized the police to search that phone for "[d]igital data to include, but not limited to photographs, videos, text messages, and memory SD card(s)." The warrant also stated that this "property and evidence ... is evidence of the crime or crimes of Sexual Exploitation of a Minor and Voyeurism." In the affidavit supporting the search warrant application, officers did not mention that Hoffman had, later in his interview, identified the white phone as the one he had used. When the police attempted to execute the warrant, however, Hoffman "failed to unlock the phone" and the police were unable to bypass the "security feature" to gain access, so "[n]o data was obtained" that day from the gray phone.

¶9 The next day, December 19, 2018, Detective interviewed Sarah at the Children's Justice Center; the interview began at 3:26 p.m. and lasted approximately forty minutes. In her written statement signed on the day of the incident, Sarah had not described the phone she had seen underneath the bathroom door, and when Detective asked about that during this interview, Sarah described the phone as a white phone, with "a black area on the phone cover where the camera was located." After the interview, Detective and Sarah both went to Sarah's house, where Mother located a white phone and Sarah specifically identified it as the phone she had seen underneath the bathroom door; Sarah and Mother then surrendered possession of the white phone to Detective. At 6:04 p.m., Mother signed a form consenting to a search of the white phone.

¶10 At 4:29 p.m. that same day, while Detective was finishing up his interview with Sarah and making his way over to the house, other officers in Detective's department submitted an application for a second search warrant regarding the gray phone, this time asking for authority to submit the phone to a third party for a "chip off," a procedure that "physically dismantle[s] the phone in order to obtain the digital data stored" on it. In the affidavit supporting the search warrant application, officers again did not mention Hoffman's statement—from the latter part of his earlier interview with Detective—that the phone he claimed to have used was the white phone. And likely because the officers submitting the warrant application did not yet know what Sarah had said during her interview with Detective, officers also did not inform the magistrate that Sarah had identified the white phone as the phone she saw under the bathroom door. A short time later, the second...