Court Opinion

ID: 9363068
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-01-13 17:07:45.402826+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:15:28.310746
License: Public Domain

J-S23041-22

NON-PRECEDENTIAL DECISION - SEE SUPERIOR COURT I.O.P. 65.37

    COMMONWEALTH OF PENNSYLVANIA               :    IN THE SUPERIOR COURT OF
                                               :         PENNSYLVANIA
                                               :
                v.                             :
                                               :
                                               :
    SHANE R. KELEC                             :
                                               :
                       Appellant               :    No. 1520 MDA 2021

        Appeal from the Judgment of Sentence Entered August 31, 2021
     In the Court of Common Pleas of Lancaster County Criminal Division at
                       No(s): CP-36-CR-0005497-2019

BEFORE:      STABILE, J., McLAUGHLIN, J., and COLINS, J.*

MEMORANDUM BY COLINS, J.:                      FILED: JANUARY 13, 2023

        Appellant, Shane R. Kelec, appeals from the judgments of sentence

imposed after a jury found him guilty of indecent assault of a person less than

thirteen years of age, corruption of a minor, unlawful contact with a minor,

and endangering the welfare of a child.1           He challenges the weight of the

evidence sustaining the jury’s verdicts. Upon review, we affirm.

        The trial court summarized the factual and pre-verdict procedural

history as follows:

        On August 19, 2019, then ten-year-old L.L. told her mother that
        Appellant—mother’s husband and L.L.’s stepfather—had touched

____________________________________________

*   Retired Senior Judge assigned to the Superior Court.

1 18 Pa.C.S. §§ 3126(a)(7), 6301(a)(1)(ii), 6318(a)(1), and 4304(a),
respectively.
J-S23041-22

       her inappropriately when she was younger.[2] Following L.L.’s
       disclosure, her mother contacted the Lancaster City Police and an
       interview was arranged between L.L. and a forensic interviewer at
       the Lancaster County Children’s Alliance. During the August 29,
       2019, Children’s Alliance interview, L.L. stated that Appellant had
       called her into his bedroom and told her to pull her pants down.
       L.L. explained to the forensic interviewer that after her pants were
       down, “Appellant began touching her private part, later identified
       as her vagina, with his fingers” and that Appellant “put her up in
       the middle of the bed and got on top of her ‘like he was doing
       pushups’ and put his private part, later identified as his penis,
       against her private part and moved it back and forth and that
       white stuff then came of his part.”

       On August 30, 2019, as a result of the information that L.L. shared
       with the forensic interviewer, Appellant was charged with the
       offenses of Criminal Attempt at Rape of a Child, Criminal Attempt
       at Involuntary Deviate Sexual Intercourse with a Child, Indecent
       Assault of a Person Less Than 13 Years of Age, Corruption of a
       Minor, Unlawful Contact with a Minor, and Endangering the
       Welfare of Children.

       Prior to trial, the Commonwealth filed a Petition to Admit Out-of-
       Court Statements Under the Tender Years Exception, 42 Pa.
       C.S.A. § 5985.1, seeking to establish the admissibility of the
       statements that L.L. made to her mother and to the Children’s
       Alliance forensic interviewer. A hearing was held on October 21,
       2020, after which [the trial court] found that both of L.L.’s
       statements were relevant and provided sufficient indic[i]a of
       reliability to be admissible as substantive evidence pursuant to
       Section 5985.1.

       A trial commenced on April 5, 2021, during which the jury heard
       testimony from L.L., L.L.’s mother, the Children’s Alliance forensic
       interviewer, and the officer who filed charges against Appellant.
       The jury also viewed the recorded August 29, 2019, interview
       between L.L. and the Children’s Alliance forensic interviewer.

____________________________________________

2 L.L. testified that she was “[e]ither four or five” years old during the
inappropriate touching incident. N.T. 4/5/21, 97.

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Trial Court Opinion, 1/14/22, 1-3 (record citations and footnotes omitted).3

       On April 6, 2021, the jury found Appellant guilty of the above-referenced

offenses. N.T. 4/6/21, 234-35. The jury also found Appellant not guilty of

attempted rape of a child and attempted involuntary deviate sexual

intercourse.4     Id. at 233-34.          After sentencing was deferred for the

preparation of a pre-sentence investigation report, the court imposed

concurrent terms of nine to twenty-three months’ imprisonment, to be

followed by three years’ probation, for all the offenses. N.T. 8/31/21, 16-17;

Sentencing Order, 8/31/21, 1.

       Appellant timely filed a post-sentence in which he challenged the weight

of the evidence for the following reasons:

       (a)    The Victim’s mother testified that during the timeframe the
              Victim alleged the incident occurred, she could not
              remember “for the life of her” one time that [Appellant]
              would have been home alone with the Victim.

       (b)    The Victim’s first disclosure was to her mother [o]n August
              19, 2019, 5 years after the alleged incident occurred, the
              evening before the Victim’s half-brother and half-sister were
              to return to the custody of [Appellant]. At that time,
              [Appellant] and Victim’s mother were involved in a
              contentious custody dispute regarding the parties’ two
____________________________________________

3 We note that a compact disc purporting to contain the recorded interview of
L.L., that was marked and moved into the record as Commonwealth Exhibit 1
at trial, was included with the certified record for this appeal. Unfortunately,
this Court’s Legal Systems department was unable to play the files on the disc
with the Court’s available computer programs. We, therefore, cannot consider
the contents of the disc in evaluating Appellant’s issue for our review.

418 Pa.C.S. § 901(a)/18 Pa.C.S. § 3123(a)(7) and 18 Pa.C.S. § 901(a)/18
Pa.C.S. § 3123(a)(7), respectively.

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            biological children, and, Mother had previously been denied
            a custodial vacation with the children that was to begin
            August 20, 2019.

      (c)   The Victim’s story was not consistent on many items,
            including, initially promising her mother that [Appellant]
            touched her only with his hand, before later claiming that
            [Appellant] got on top of her and rubbed up and down until
            “white stuff came out.”

      (d)   Victim’s Mother testified that around this same time period,
            her brother (the Victim’s uncle) had engaged in some sexual
            type behavior with the Victim.

      (e)   The victim testified that this occurred on only one occasion,
            after awaking from a bad dream, and when she wandered
            into her mother and [Appellant’s] bedroom to find her
            mother.

Post-Sentence Motion, 9/10/21, ¶ 6(a)-(e).       Following the denial of that

motion, Appellant timely filed a notice of appeal and a court-ordered concise

statement of errors complained of on appeal.        Rule 1925(b) Statement,

12/20/21; Rule 1925 Order, 11/29/21; Notice of Appeal, 11/24/21; Order

Denying Post-Sentence Motion, 10/26/21.

      Appellant presents the following issue for our review:

      The trial court abused its discretion in finding that the guilty
      verdict for the charges of indecent assault, corruption of minors,
      unlawful contact with a minor and endangering the welfare of a
      minor was not against the weight of the evidence where the
      testimony was so unreliable, inconsistent and contradictory that
      the verdict was based purely on conjecture.

Appellant’s Brief at 5.

      Appellant challenges the weight of the evidence. He takes a five-step

approach to assailing the credibility of the Commonwealth’s evidence. First,

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he points out the victim’s mother’s testimony about it being uncommon for

the victim to have been left alone with him and that she could not think of a

time when Appellant was left alone with the victim in order to suggest that

the child victim’s memory was unreliable. Appellant’s Brief at 10-11, citing

N.T. 4/5/21, 95, 124, 141.      Second, he asserts that the victim offered

contradictory accounts of the circumstances surrounding the disclosure of the

touching incident to her mother.      Appellant’s Brief at 11-12, citing N.T.

4/5/21, 106-07, 125, 144; Commonwealth Exhibit 1 (interview recording).

Third, he identifies inconsistences with the victim’s accounts of the touching

incident to her mother, the Children’s Alliance, and the jury. Appellant’s Brief

at 12-14, citing N.T. 4/5/21, 97-100, 107, 126; Commonwealth Exhibit 1.

Fourth, he suggests that the victim and her mother had a motive to fabricate

the account of the abuse because Appellant and the victim’s mother had

competing custody claims involving the victim’s half-siblings, and the timing

of the initial report was suspect because it occurred a day before the half-

siblings would be returned to Appellant and before a scheduled vacation for

the victim and her mother that otherwise would have been a custody week for

Appellant. Appellant’s Brief at 14-16, citing N.T. 4/5/21, 111, 123, 129-30,

133, 135. Lastly, Appellant asserts that the testimony of the victim and her

mother were inconsistent about whether an incident occurred where the

victim’s uncle, who is inflicted with Down syndrome and autism, became

“overstimulated with the victim on a bed.” Appellant’s Brief at 16, citing N.T.

117, 143.

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      Initially, the following legal principles apply when a challenge to the

weight of the evidence supporting a conviction is presented to a trial court:

      A motion for a new trial based on a claim that the verdict is against
      the weight of the evidence is addressed to the discretion of the
      trial court. A new trial should not be granted because of a mere
      conflict in the testimony or because the judge on the same facts
      would have arrived at a different conclusion. Rather, the role of
      the trial judge is to determine that notwithstanding all the facts,
      certain facts are so clearly of greater weight that to ignore them
      or to give them equal weight with all the facts is to deny justice.
      It has often been stated that a new trial should be awarded when
      the jury’s verdict is so contrary to the evidence as to shock one’s
      sense of justice and the award of a new trial is imperative so that
      right may be given another opportunity to prevail.

Commonwealth v. Clay, 64 A.3d 1049, 1054-55 (Pa. 2013) (internal

citations and quotation marks omitted).

      With respect to the limits of a trial court’s discretion, our Supreme Court

has explained:

      The term ‘discretion’ imports the exercise of judgment, wisdom
      and skill so as to reach a dispassionate conclusion, within the
      framework of the law, and is not exercised for the purpose of
      giving effect to the will of the judge. Discretion must be exercised
      on the foundation of reason, as opposed to prejudice, personal
      motivations, caprice or arbitrary actions. Discretion is abused
      when the course pursued represents not merely an error of
      judgment, but where the judgment is manifestly unreasonable or
      where the law is not applied or where the record shows that the
      action is a result of partiality, prejudice, bias or ill will.

Commonwealth v. Widmer, 744 A.2d 745, 753 (Pa. 2000) (citation

omitted).

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      This Court does not review the underlying question of whether the

verdict is against the weight of evidence and instead reviews the trial court’s

exercise of discretion in denying a weight claim presented below:

      Appellate review of a weight claim is a review of the exercise of
      discretion, not of the underlying question of whether the verdict
      is against the weight of the evidence. Because the trial judge has
      had the opportunity to hear and see the evidence presented, an
      appellate court will give the gravest consideration to the findings
      and reasons advanced by the trial judge when reviewing a trial
      court’s determination that the verdict is against the weight of the
      evidence. One of the least assailable reasons for granting or
      denying a new trial is the lower court’s conviction that the verdict
      was or was not against the weight of the evidence and that a new
      trial should be granted in the interest of justice.

Widmer, 744 A.2d at 753 (internal citations omitted).

      In its opinion, the trial court offers a recap of the testimony from L.L.

and her mother and the pertinent portions of L.L.’s recorded interview with

the Children’s Alliance. Trial Court Opinion, 1/14/22, 5-7. It also offers us

the following commentary on its review of the credibility of the trial evidence:

      In light of the testimony outlined above, I, like the jury, found the
      evidence presented at trial was neither unreliable, inconsistent,
      nor contradictory. L.L.’s recounting of the incident on all three
      occasions–to her mother, to the forensic interviewer, and at trial–
      were wholly consistent, even if each recounting was not precisely
      identical. Further, no testimony was presented that made the
      verdict so shocking to one’s sense of justice and contrary to the
      evidence to warrant a finding that the verdict should be
      overturned.

Id. at 7-8 (footnote omitted).      In an oversized footnote, the trial court

specifically addresses each subpart of Appellant’s weight claim from his post-

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sentence motion. Id. at 8-10 n.5. We must review the court’s considerations

for rejecting each sub-part because that analysis forms the basis for the trial

court’s conclusion that the verdicts were not against the weight of the

evidence.

      In the first subpart, the court addresses Appellant’s assertion that the

verdicts were against the weight of the evidence because L.L.’s mother

testified that she could not think of a time when L.L. was left “home alone”

with Appellant. Trial Court Opinion, 1/14/22, 8 n.5, citing N.T. 4/5/21, 141.

The court did not find this part of the weight claim persuasive because “[t]he

whole of L.L.’s mother’s testimony in no way foreclosed the possibility that

L.L. and Appellant could have been alone together during the period in

question.” Trial Court Opinion, 1/14/22, 8 n.5. We find no abuse of discretion

in this respect because L.L.’s mother did not testify that Appellant was never

left alone with L.L., and instead her testimony reflected only that she could

not remember a particular time during which L.L. was left alone with

Appellant. That L.L.’s mother could not independently recall an opportunity

for the incident to have occurred did not render incredible L.L.’s account of

the assault or her testimony about being left alone with Appellant.        The

reasonable conclusion suggested by L.L.’s mother’s testimony was that the

opportunity for the abuse occurred at an inconsequential time for L.L.’s

mother. See N.T. 4/5/21, 141 (during L.L.’s mother’s testimony: “Q. But you

can’t think of any time that would have been? A. It could have been a snow

day. I’m not sure.”); see also id. at 96 (during L.L.’s testimony: “Q. And tell

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me about the times it would be where [Appellant] was watching you. [W]here

would mom be? A. She would probably be at work.”).

      Next, the court addresses Appellant’s suggestion that the timing of L.L.’s

disclosure of the assault was connected to a custody dispute between

Appellant and L.L.’s mother. Trial Court Opinion, 1/14/22, 8-9 n.5. The court

rejected that subpart of the weight claim because the court gleaned from the

testimony that L.L. only had a “seemingly limited knowledge of the custody

dispute” and, “considered in the context of the entirety of L.L.’s testimony,”

that knowledge did not render the verdict shocking. Id. The court highlighted

L.L.’s testimony reflecting that, while she was aware of her mother and

Appellant “fighting over custody,” her mother never talked to her “about

fighting with Appellant about the kids.” Id., citing N.T. 4/5/21, 95, 111. The

approach taken by the trial court is entirely reasonable. The court found L.L.

to be a credible witness and, upon accepting her testimony at face value, it

did not support the notion either that her mother manipulated her into

fabricating her account of the assault or that the twelve-year-old witness

independently embarked on a scheme to frame Appellant because of a custody

dispute that her mother never discussed with her. See, e.g., N.T. 4/5/21,

111 (during L.L.’s testimony: “Q. Now, did you ever overhear your mom

discussing custody issues at all or -- A. She usually kept it private because I

don’t think she wanted me to, like, get upset or hear anything.”).

      As for Appellant’s assertion that L.L.’s testimony was inconsistent about

the assault, the court responds that “although L.L.’s statement to her mother,

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[her] forensic interview[,] and [her] trial testimony were not entirely identical,

her various testimonies were not meaningfully inconsistent.”             Trial Court

Opinion, 1/14/22, 9 n.5. While the court did not elaborate further on that

point, the simple reality is that the jury as the fact finder was tasked with

making    a   credibility   determination,    fully   aware   of   the    supposed

inconsistencies, and resolved them in the Commonwealth’s favor.                   A

reasonable explanation for the differences in the accounts could be attributed

to the child’s relative comfort speaking with the forensic interviewer, as

opposed to speaking to her mother about the sexual actions committed by her

mother’s husband. Moreover, another contributing factor to any inconsistency

in the retelling of the abuse report would be the passage of more than nineteen

months between the initial report to the victim’s mother and the opportunity

to testify at trial. We do not determine that the trial court committed an abuse

of discretion when it found that the differences in L.L.’s accounts over time

were properly resolved by that jury and that those differences did not render

the verdicts shocking.

      In the penultimate section, the court addresses Appellant’s assertion

that the verdict was against the weight of the evidence because L.L. and her

mother were inconsistent about the existence of an incident where L.L.’s

cognitively-impaired uncle was “overstimulated” with L.L. Appellant’s Brief at

16; Trial Court Opinion, 1/14/22, 9-10 n.5. The court acknowledges that L.L.’s

mother testified that her brother, who has Down syndrome and autism, “does

something with his penis” when he is “overstimulated in a situation,” and that,

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on one occasion, that occurred while he was on a bed with L.L.       Id. at 9,

citing N.T. 4/5/21, 142-43. It also notes that L.L. testified that she did not

remember “anything strange occurring” with her uncle or remembered seeing

“his private area.” Id. at 9-10, citing N.T. 4/5/21, 116-17. The trial court

advises us that “[n]either L.L.’s mother’s testimony[,] nor L.L.’s testimony

regarding [the uncle,] is of such a nature to constitute the ‘extraordinary

circumstance’ which would warrant a finding that the jury’s verdict was against

the weight of the evidence.” Id. at 10. We cannot find any basis to disagree

with the trial court’s rejection of this sub-part of the weight claim.     Any

incident involving the uncle in these respects would only be relevant if there

were indicia of an issue concerning mistaken identity and L.L. was improperly

imputing acts by the uncle to Appellant. That did not appear to be the case

based on the entirety of the victim’s testimony. Furthermore, the details of

the uncle’s “overstimulation” would not naturally lend to a mistaken identity

issue for credibility purposes because the uncle’s alleged overstimulation

related to him touching himself whereas L.L.’s account of the assault was

about improper touching of herself by another.

      With respect to the final subpart, the court addresses Appellant’s

assertion from the post-sentence motion that “[t]he victim testified that this

occurred on only one occasion, after awaking from a bad dream, and when

she wandered into her mother and [Appellant’s] bedroom to find her mother.”

Trial Court Opinion, 1/14/22, 10 n.5; Post-Sentence Motion, 9/10/21, ¶ 6(e).

The trial court was unable to materially address this portion of the claim

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without further elaboration from Appellant. See Trial Court Opinion, 1/14/22,

10 n.5 (“I need not address this argument further because Appellant fails to

elaborate how this testimony would cause me to find that the jury’s verdict is

against the weight of the evidence.”). By failing to adequately develop this

subpart of the claim with specificity in the post-sentence motion, Appellant

waived this portion of his claim for purposes of our review. See Pa.R.Crim.P.

720(B)(1)(a) (requiring that post-sentence motions state claims for relief

“with specificity and particularity”); see, e.g., Commonwealth v. Rush, 959

A.2d 945, 949 (Pa. Super. 2008) (“Moreover, for any claim that was required

to be preserved, this Court cannot review a legal theory in support of that

claim unless that particular legal theory was presented to the trial court.”).5

       We detect no abuse of discretion in the trial court’s denial of Appellant’s

post-sentence weight of the evidence claim. It was purely within the jury’s

discretion to believe the victim and the Commonwealth’s witnesses and we

____________________________________________

5 Absent waiver, this Court would not have concluded that this subpart of the
claim would have affected the denial of the weight claim. In Appellant’s
elaborated version of the subpart of the claim in his appellate brief, he focuses
on the fact that victim testified that she was frightened by a horror movie prior
to her disclosure of the assault to her mother, that the mother testified that
the victim did not tell her anything about a movie, and that the victim’s
disclosure in her Children’s Alliance interview did not include any mention of
a movie. Appellant’s Brief at 11-12. Whether the victim had been frightened
by a movie on the night of her disclosure of the abuse to her mother was an
inconsequential circumstance in the overall chain of events of L.L. first telling
her mother about the assault. Whether L.L.’s mother failed to recall her
daughter mentioning anything about a movie at the time of the assault
disclosure and whether L.L. failed to mention her fright from a movie in a
subsequent interview about the assault would not have reasonably rendered
the verdict in this case shocking.

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will not disturb that on appeal. The trial court reasonably determined that the

verdict in this case does not shock one’s sense of justice.

     Judgments of sentence affirmed.
Judgment Entered.

Joseph D. Seletyn, Esq.
Prothonotary

Date: 1/13/2023

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