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 .

[SPECIAL NOTE: This opinion uses the "Universal Citation." It was given an "official" citation when it was issued. You should use this citation whenever you cite the opinion, with a P.3d parallel citation. Please note when you look at the opinion that all of the paragraphs are numbered. When you pinpoint cite to a quote, you should cite to this paragraph number rather than to any page number. If you need assistance in putting together a citation using the Universal Citation form, please contact the Wyoming State Law Library.]

Summary 2007 WY 201

Summary of Decision issued December 18, 2007

[SPECIAL NOTE: This opinion uses "Universal Citation" and was given an "official" citation when issued. You should use this citation whenever you cite the opinion, with a P.3d parallel citation. You will note that all of the paragraphs are numbered. When you need to provide a pinpoint citation, the universal portion of the citation will use that paragraph number. The pinpoint citation in the P.3d portion should include the reporter page number. If you need assistance, please contact the Wyoming State Law Library.]

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

Case Name: Jones v. State

Citation: 2007 WY 201

Docket Number: 06-243

Appeal from the District Court of Campbell County, the Honorable John R. Perry, Judge

Representing Appellant (Defendant): Tina Kerin, Appellate Counsel; and David E. Westling, Senior Appellate Counsel, Wyoming Pubic Defender Program, Cheyenne, Wyoming.

Representing Appellee (Plaintiff): Patrick J. Crank, Wyoming Attorney General; Terry L. Armitage, Deputy Attorney General; D. Michael Pauling, Senior Assistant Attorney General; Dana J. Lent, Assistant Attorney General. Argument by Ms. Lent.

Issue: Is Wyo. Stat. Ann. §06-4-303(a)(ii)(B) vague on its face or in its application to Jone’s case and did the district court err in ruling that it was not unconstitutionally overbroad.

Facts/Discussion: Appellant was charged with seven counts of violating Wyo. Stat. Ann. §06-4-303(a)(ii)(B). Appellant entered into a conditional plea agreement with the State wherein he pled guilty to two of the seven counts. The conditions included one which allowed Appellant to challenge the constitutionality of the statute under which he was convicted.
Standard of Review: Appellant’s challenge to the constitutionality of the statute presents a question of law that the Court reviews de novo. The Court set out verbatim their discussion of the applicable standard of review from their Rutti decision in order that their jurisprudence might remain consistent and clear.
The Court stated that it was evident that the challenges to laws aimed at regulating, by criminal statute, sexual performances by children and child pornography in general, are evolving constantly as the courts wrestle with the fine lines between what is prohibited and what is permitted – what is protected speech under the First Amendment and what is not protected. No doubt, statutes will have to be fine-tuned as the case law develops. However, in light of their decision in Rutti, they stated they did not need to give a dispositive answer to the issue raised here because Appellant admitted that the visual images in question were child pornography and further evidence from the State established they were real children and not images virtually indistinguishable from children.

Holding: The Court acknowledged that it has been held that a trier of fact is capable of determining whether real children were used in pornographic images simply by viewing the images themselves. Therefore, under the circumstances of this case the Court did not need to address the question of whether an image that was virtually indistinguishable from a child exceeded the limits imposed by the First Amendment. The question of whether the statute is vague or overbroad in that sense must be determined in a case where the image at issue is alleged to be that of an individual virtually indistinguishable from a child, but not actually a child.

Affirmed.

J. Hill delivered the opinion.

Link: http://tinyurl.com/yqwo3n .