Court Opinion

ID: 9611712
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-22 03:59:38.710947+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T18:03:16.130035
License: Public Domain

GRAY, Justice,
dissenting.
The relationship between the victim and her step-mother over the two years between the victim’s outcry of sexual assault and the time of trial had apparently not been particularly good. Within days after the trial, the victim’s step-mother told the victim’s father that either the victim must leave their home or the step-mother would. The eight year old victim, now ten, chose to return to live with her mother, the household in which she had been assaulted. Keeter was not living there at the time she returned to live with her mother.
On the day the victim returned to her mother’s house, she told her mother that she had lied about what Keeter, her stepfather, had done to her. After she said that she had lied about what Keeter had done, Keeter’s father, who had lived with the victim at the time of the assault, was nice to her. Keeter’s father had been told to leave the court-house during the trial because he threatened to take the victim’s father away from her, just like she had taken Keeter away from his children, the victim’s half-siblings.
The trial judge, who observed all the witnesses during trial, was presented with this and other testimony in determining if the recantation of the victim’s statement was credible. The trial court determined that the recantation was not credible. Finding no abuse of discretion in that determination, I would affirm the trial court’s denial of the motion for new trial. Because the majority does not, I respectfully dissent.