Opinion ID: 1461893
Heading Depth: 1
Heading Rank: 5

Heading: Childhood Rape Accusation

Text: The defendant next challenges the trial justice's decision to bar his use on cross-examination of evidence that, when the victim was fifteen-years old, she told a psychiatrist that she had been raped at age seven by an unnamed fourteen-year-old paperboy. The victim was twenty-seven when defendant, her estranged husband, was on trial for raping her. Thus, the defense sought to impeach the victim by using evidence of an allegation she had made more than ten years earlier, when she was still a teenager, about an incident that supposedly happened to her some twenty years before defendant's trial, when she was just a seven-year-old child. It is the duty of the trial justice to determine relevance and to balance the probative value of evidence against its possible misleading effect upon the jurors. Warner, 626 A.2d at 209. The proffered evidence involved an unidentified assailant's alleged assault on a child some twenty years earlier, one that was not even reported until six years after the alleged occurrence. Given the dissimilarity of this incident to those at issue during defendant's trial, the trial justice was entitled to consider the jury's potential confusion, the victim's tender age when the charge was made and when the underlying event supposedly occurred, and the remoteness in time of this prior charge asweighing against its admission into evidence. Thus, we are not persuaded that the trial justice abused his discretion in precluding cross-examination concerning this incident. See State v. Simpson, 606 A.2d 677, 680 (R.I.1992). The defendant asserts that evidence of the challenged rape charge was relevant to show the complainant's intent to initiate proceedings that would cause a person to answer charges in court, as well as suggesting that she had a history or pattern of bringing such charges. But no evidence indicated that any one was ever brought to court or accused of raping the victim, much less was there any showing that the charge was false. Indeed, the victim, who was just a young girl when this event allegedly occurred, did not even mention this incident to anyone until she was approximately thirteen-years old. Thereafter, she did not discuss the alleged incident again until two years later, when a doctor asked her whether she ever had been raped. Even then, the alleged perpetrator was referred to only as a fourteen-year-old paperboy. Thus, the defense would not have been able to show how the incident indicated a vengeful motive on the victim's part vis-à-vis defendant, because she never identified the accused fourteen-year old by name nor caused any charges to be filed against him. Moreover, she was only seven-years old when the incident allegedly occurred. Thus, such evidence would hardly have been sufficient to suggest a pattern or practice of accusing men of sexually abusing her. In Oliveira, this Court explored whether prior sexual-abuse accusations that were never shown to be false could be used to impeach the credibility of a complaining witness. There, the complaining witness, an eleven-year-old girl, testified that when she was eight-years old her mother's boyfriend had molested her sexually. Oliveira, 576 A.2d at 112. Government records also revealed that the child had accused two other men of sexually abusing her. Id. at 113. Relying upon the Rape Shield Statute, [2] the trial justice precluded any use of these other accusations unless the child had recanted them or changed her testimony concerning those charges. Id. On appeal this Court reversed, holding that the trial justice misinterpreted the Rape Shield Statute. Id. The purpose of the Rape Shield Statute, the Court stated, was to encourage victims to report crimes without fear of inviting unnecessary probing into the victim's sexual history. Id. (citing State v. Lemon, 456 A.2d 261, 264 (R.I.1983)). If, however, evidence of a victim's sexual history was found relevant (including challenges to the witness's credibility) after the defense made a specific offer of proof, then the evidence could be admitted. Oliveira, 576 A.2d at 113. Furthermore, relevance would not turn on the proven falsity of a previous similar accusation. Id. Finally, Oliveira held that even if the evidence might be probative of the witness's bias, the trial justice could exclude it if its probative value was outweighed by a prejudicial effect, such as confusion of the issues. Id. at 114 (citing R.I. R. Evid. 403). In this case, the defense sought to cross-examine the twenty-seven-year old victim about a sexual assault that allegedly occurred more than twenty years ago, when she was a young child. As in Oliveira, the trial justice granted the state's motion in limine to preclude any use of the previous unprosecuted allegation to impeach the victim. But this situation is markedly different from the one in Oliveira. First, the charges in Oliveira were similar to one or more of the charges that the accused was facing at trial. The charge at issue there and the two previous accusations all were instances of alleged childhood sexual abuse that had occurred before the child's ninth birthday. Here, on the other hand, defendant was charged with first- and second-degree sexual assault upon the adult victim. These charges were fundamentally different from the victim's teenage accusation against the paperboy because (1) adult sexual assault charges may involve the defense of consent whereas childhood sexual molestation charges do not, and (2) a thirteen-year old alleging, for the first time, an incident of sexual abuse that occurred some six years earlier when she was only seven-years old, after she has been prompted with a leading question by a doctor, is markedly different from a twenty-seven-year old immediately reporting to the police a sexual assault allegedly committed against her by her former husband. Second, the allegations in Oliveira all occurred before the child's ninth birthday. At all times in Oliveira the Court was dealing with childhood sexual-abuse allegations from a young child who reported them shortly after they occurred. Here, the two alleged incidents of abuse occurred more than twenty years apart and the accusations themselves occurred many years apart under very different circumstances. Also, there is no record that the victim ever reiterated her teenage allegation against the paperboy when she was an adult. Thus, this allegation against the paperboy was too remote in time from any period relevant to the trial, and allowing the defendant to refer to it on cross-examination would have served only to confuse the jury. For these reasons, we conclude the trial justice did not err in keeping this evidence from the jury. C.