United States v. Piette

• Decision Date: 18 August 2022
• Docket Number: 20-7008
• Parties: UNITED STATES of America, Plaintiff - Appellee, v. Henri Michelle PIETTE, a/k/a Henri Michel Piette, a/k/a Henri Billy, a/k/a Dan Reed, a/k/a Billy Ira Sloop, Jr., a/k/a Michael Wayne Mansfield, a/k/a Christopher Allen McAnear, Defendant - Appellant.
• Court: U.S. Court of Appeals — Tenth Circuit

45 F.4th 1142

UNITED STATES of America, Plaintiff - Appellee,

v.Henri Michelle PIETTE, a/k/a Henri Michel Piette, a/k/a Henri Billy, a/k/a Dan Reed, a/k/a Billy Ira Sloop, Jr., a/k/a Michael Wayne Mansfield, a/k/a Christopher Allen McAnear, Defendant - Appellant.

No. 20-7008

United States Court of Appeals, Tenth Circuit.

FILED August 18, 2022

Alan S. Mouritsen, Parsons Behle & Latimer, Salt Lake City, Utah, for Defendant-Appellant.

Linda A. Epperley, Assistant United States Attorney (Christopher J. Wilson, Acting United States Attorney, and Sarah McAmis, Assistant United States Attorney, with her on the brief), Office of the United States Attorney, Muskogee, Oklahoma, for Plaintiff-Appellee.

Before McHUGH, EBEL, and EID, Circuit Judges.

EID, Circuit Judge.

A jury in the Eastern District of Oklahoma convicted Henri Piette of kidnapping and traveling with intent to engage in sexual relations with a juvenile. The district court sentenced Piette to life imprisonment on the former conviction and 360 months’ imprisonment on the latter. He seeks to have his convictions overturned or his sentence reversed. We hold that the district court did not err by admitting evidence of Piette's uncharged acts of molestation, and that statutes extending the unexpired charging period for the traveling-with-intent charge did not have an impermissible retroactive effect. However, we conclude that the district court plainly erred by misallocating the burden of proof once Piette disputed the timing of the kidnapping by arguing that the victim, Rosalynn McGinnis, consented. If she had consented, the kidnapping would have been over, and the statute of limitations would have begun to run, potentially rendering the indictment untimely. We reverse Piette's kidnapping conviction because there is a difference between what happened here—Piette failing to prove by a preponderance of the evidence that McGinnis ever consented—and what the Constitution requires: the government proving beyond a reasonable doubt that she never consented at a time that would cause a statute of limitations problem. Finally, we reject Piette's argument that he was denied his Sixth Amendment right to self-representation at sentencing. Exercising jurisdiction under 28 U.S.C. § 1291, we affirm in part, reverse in part, and remand for further proceedings.

I.

a.

The following account is based on trial testimony. Rosalynn McGinnis was born in 1984. In the early 1990s, McGinnis lived in Springfield, Missouri, with her parents, Gayla and Michael, and several siblings. One day, while playing at the park, the McGinnis children met Henri Piette's children. The kids became close, bonding over sleepovers, movies, meals, and time spent on Piette's trampoline.

Piette first molested McGinnis at one of these sleepovers. She was nine. At first, she thought it was a "bad dream," but soon she realized that it was far too detailed to have been a dream. R. Vol. II at 188. Gayla had not believed McGinnis when she was previously molested by her half-brother, so McGinnis did not tell anyone about what Piette did.

McGinnis was not Piette's only victim in Springfield. One of Piette's sons, Tobias Piette, testified that he saw Piette molest several other children while they lived there. One day, he walked in on Piette giving an eight-year-old girl a shower and touching her vagina. Another time, he saw Piette giving a different young girl a driving lesson; he groped her butt while she sat on his lap.

As the McGinnis and Piette children got to know each other better, so did Gayla McGinnis and Henri Piette. They discussed Gayla's interest in religion and the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Piette gradually drove Gayla away from her husband Michael, who did not share her interest in these topics and was often away from home. Soon, Michael left Gayla and the children entirely. "Almost immediately," McGinnis's brother testified, it was as if Piette "had stepped into [Michael's] shoes." Id. at 489.

But Piette ran a very different kind of home. He read Bible passages to the children constantly. He encouraged Gayla to physically discipline the children. He started separating the children and imposed something "almost like a hierarchy system." Id. He beat Gayla "countless" times. Id. at 634. He also beat the children. After one of Piette's beatings drew the attention of authorities, Piette convinced Gayla that she would be blamed for it, and they took the family on the road. They moved on an almost daily basis, passing through Arizona, Oregon, Utah, California, Montana, Missouri, Texas, Oklahoma, and Guatemala. Piette forced the others to beg for money. They lived in a tent. Piette gave McGinnis beer and molested her daily.

Piette, Gayla, and the children settled in Wagoner, Oklahoma. There, Piette escalated his physical, sexual, and psychological abuse. He hit the children with two-by-fours when they said "hanged" instead of "hung." Id. at 212. He punched Gayla in the face. He raped McGinnis. She was eleven. Finally, Gayla escaped to her mother's home in Independence, Missouri, and took her children with her. A few weeks later, Piette went to Independence and took them back.

When they returned to Wagoner, Piette addressed his "sin" with McGinnis by marrying her in a secret ceremony officiated by Piette's son Tobias. Id. at 219. Piette also married Gayla around this time. The sexual abuse of McGinnis continued unabated. Piette performed oral sex on McGinnis and penetrated her vagina daily with his penis and fingers. She was twelve. After a run-in with Child Protective Services, McGinnis and her family landed in a domestic violence shelter in Poteau, Oklahoma, away from Piette. McGinnis briefly attended middle school in Poteau.

On January 31, 1997, McGinnis went to school in Poteau and did not come home. Piette visited her on the playground that day. He told McGinnis that he loved her and that he would reunite their family. He told her to look for "signs." Id. at 234. Later that day, McGinnis noticed a sombrero and a poncho inside a school building; she recognized them from a trip to Mexico with Piette. She ran outside the school and saw Tobias Piette in a truck; he took her to Tulsa, where they met up with Piette and Piette's other children. When McGinnis asked about the rest of her family, Piette told her there was not enough time to get her brothers and that Gayla "wasn't coming back." Id. at 240. He introduced McGinnis to his children as "their new mother." Id. McGinnis was horrified.

McGinnis did not attend school after the sixth grade. Piette moved McGinnis and his children around the country several times, taking advantage of benefits provided by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, and avoiding detection by using false names and changing McGinnis's appearance.¹ Everyone was drilled on what to say if people started asking questions. Piette forced McGinnis to write letters to relatives, the media, and law enforcement, saying that she ran away from her "crazy" mother and "no good" family. Id. at 263. If she misspelled a word she was hit. In reality, Gayla diligently searched for McGinnis.

Piette continued subjecting McGinnis to constant physical and sexual violence. He raped her "[t]hree times a day, maybe more." Id. at 249. Shortly before McGinnis turned thirteen, while living in Oklahoma City, she became pregnant for the first time. She had a miscarriage and Piette told her to flush it down the toilet. Piette started giving McGinnis crack cocaine and beat her more frequently. Then, while living in Idaho, McGinnis became pregnant again. This time, she was fourteen. Piette moved the family to Mexico to avoid questions about her pregnancy, but when Piette brought McGinnis to the hospital the doctors said it was too soon to deliver the baby. Piette disagreed. He used a pocketknife to deliver the baby on the floor of a van. At the time, they were "living in an abandoned trailer that was on a piece of land that had no electricity, no water, had holes in the floors and was infested with bed bugs." Id. at 276.

Over the next sixteen years, Piette moved the family around Mexico and Guatemala, rarely spending more than a few months in any one location, though they would take occasional trips back to the United States. McGinnis delivered eight more of Piette's children. These children did not go to school, socialize, or even learn how to read. They were isolated from others. Piette tried to prevent them from learning where they were living. The children were also neglected. One of the boys had a single pair of shorts that he kept on his body with a rope. One of the girls almost drowned in a bucket of water. Piette hung her upside down to shake the water out and she recovered. The family's lifestyle consisted of "begging on the streets and living from place to place." Id. at 340. Sometimes, McGinnis sold ice cream and other foods. Other times, Piette would make racist comments to provoke the locals into fighting McGinnis for money. Whatever the source, all money went to Piette. He spent it on drugs and alcohol, which he also abused.

Years passed, and Piette's brutality continued. McGinnis testified that there was never a time that Piette was not beating her. He would sometimes tie McGinnis to a bed or chain her to a pole for days. She testified that she has scars all over her face, has had both her arms broken, has been stabbed and shot, suffers chronic pain, and needed throat surgery to be able to speak. Piette would also terrorize their children, hitting them with two-by-fours, bats, rocks, pans, pickaxes, glass bottles, fruit, and "[a]nything that was in reach." Id. at 119. He would beat the children to the point of unconsciousness and then tell them that he loved them. "[I]t just surprised me how close I can get to dying without dying," McGinnis's firstborn testified. Id. at 127.

Piette also started molesting the children McGinnis delivered. Ma.P., Piette's first daughter with McGinnis, testified...