Summary 2009 WY 128

Summary of Decision issued October 22, 2009

Summaries are prepared by Law Librarians and are not official statements of the Wyoming Supreme Court.

Case Name: Crain v. State; May v. State

Citation: 2009 WY 128

Docket Number: S-08-0215; S-09-0002

Appeal from the District Court of Campbell County and Teton County, the Honorable Dan R. Price II, Judge and the Honorable Nancy J. Guthrie, Judge.

Representing Appellants Crain and May: Diane M. Lozano, Wyoming State Public Defender; Tina N. Kerin, Appellate Counsel; and Eric Alden and Kirk A. Morgan, Senior Assistants Appellate Counsel.

Representing Appellee State: Bruce A. Salzburg, Wyoming Attorney General; Terry L. Armitage, Deputy Attorney General; D. Michael Pauling, Senior Assistant Attorney General; and Graham M. Smith, Assistant Attorney General.

Facts/Discussion: Appellants challenge their convictions for sexual abuse of a minor under the comprehensive amendments to Wyoming’s sexual assault statutes. The statutes at issue in these cases are § 6-2-314 through § 6-2-317.
Statutory construction: Crain and May contend that the statutes under which they were convicted should be construed to mean that if the victim is one day or more past his/her 15th birthday, then the respective statutes do not criminalize the conduct at issue in these cases. The Court has a long-standing rule that it reads statutes relating to the same subject in pari materia so that inconsistencies in one statute may be resolved by looking at another statute on the same subject. When the Court looked at the statutes as a tightly structured scheme of statutory protections designed to effectuate a method of carefully crafted gradations within the subject of sexual assault crimes, it was evident that the Appellants’ argument was absurd.
Constitutionally – vague as applied: The appellants also contended that the statutes at issue were so uncertain in their meaning that persons of ordinary intelligence might be required to guess at their meaning and thus they were constitutionally vague as applied to the facts and circumstances of these two cases. The Court concluded that when the statute is read in pari materia with all the sexual assault statutes and giving the words their ordinary and usual meaning, there was no uncertainty as to the reach of the statutes.

Conclusion: The Court held that the statutes at issue were not ambiguous and did not require the Court to construe them beyond their plain language. In addition, the Court concluded the statutes were not unconstitutionally vague as applied to the two Appellants.

Affirmed.

J. Hill delivered the decision.

Link: http://tinyurl.com/ylm4k8c .

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