Kojuan J Miles v. State

468 S.W.3d 719, 2015 Tex. App. LEXIS 6048
Court of Appeals of Texas·Decided June 16, 2015·No. NO. 14-14-00154-CR, NO. 14-14-00155-CR·Published·Cited by 19 cases

Opinion

OPINION

Sharon McCally, Justice

A jury found appellant Kojuan Miles guilty of compelling prostitution and sexual assault of the complainant, a fifteen-year-old girl. The jury assessed punishment at twenty-three years’ and seven years’ confinement, respectively, and the trial court cumulated the sentences. Appellant contends the trial court erred by excluding relevant evidence from the complainant’s Facebook page during both phases of the trial, admitting irrelevant expert testimony during the guilt phase of the trial, cumulating his sentences, and signing judgments with unnecessary verbiage describing his offenses.

We overrule appellant’s evidentiary issues and his issue concerning the verbiage of the judgments. In an issue of first impression, however, we hold that the trial court erred by cumulating sentences that resulted from a single criminal action under Section 3.03(b) of the Texas Penal Code for convictions of compelling prostitution and sexual assault of a child. We modify the trial court’s judgment in the compelling prostitution case to delete the cumulation order, affirm that judgment as modified, and affirm the trial court’s judgment in the sexual assault case.

I. Background

The complainant, Amy, 1 testified that she lived with at least seven relatives in a *723 single motel room in North Carolina. She met appellant in mid-October 2011 when she was fifteen and he was twenty-two. He was the cousin of her friend. He took Amy out to eat at a fast-food restaurant and was teaching her how to drive. She thought he was nice and cute, and he made her “feel like somebody.”

Amy told appellant about her difficult family situation, and he suggested that she leave with him for Los Angeles. She wanted to go, so she packed some clothes and left with him the following morning. Amy hoped that appellant would be her boyfriend. She thought appellant would take care of her.

They drove for two days, and at some point Amy told appellant that she wanted to go home. He said they were too'far and could not turn back around. She felt trapped. When they arrived at a truck stop in Houston, appellant asked Amy to perform oral sex on him. She complied. Then they stayed overnight at a house in Houston. He shook her awake at night and had sex with her — he put his penis inside her vagina.

The next morning, appellant told Amy that they did not have any more money for food or gas, and. they had nowhere to stay. Amy testified, “[S]o he said that I would have to sell my body.” She did not want to do it, but she complied because she was thinking “how we going to'eat and stuff.” He told her to take off her panties so that it would be easy and she would not have to take them off when she got to a guy. He told her to not go for the young guys and to go for the older guys and ones with accents. He told her that when a car pulls up, she should ask them if they want a date and get in the car. He told her to charge $60 for sex and $50 for head, i.e., oral sex. He also told her that if she were caught by police, she should use her sister’s name and date of birth because the sister was eighteen years old.

Appellant made contact with another prostitute -who was “walking” like Amy. Appellant told Amy that this- other woman was going to be Amy’s “wifey.” 2 Amy testified that she had sex eight times, although she told a doctor at the Children’s Assessment Center (CAC) that she had sex with three people. After being paid, Amy would call appellant to come pick her up. He would tell her, “Give me the bread,” i.e., money, and Amy gave it to him.

At 3:40 a.m. the following morning, appellant and Amy were sitting in a parked car in an area known for prostitution — it was a “track” where prostitutes walk the streets. Houston Police Department officers suspected prostitution activity and investigated further. . Because Amy looked “very young” and an officer suspected her to be underage, a juvenile sex crimes officer, Catherine Bartels, was called to the scene’. Bartels took Amy to the CAC for an interview and evaluation. Amy initially gave the officers her sister’s name but later acknowledged her real identity and discussed her sexual activity.

Appellant'was charged with sexual assault and compelling prostitution. A jury found him guilty on both counts and assessed punishment at seven years’ confinement for sexual assault and twenty-three years’ confinement for compelling prostitution. The trial court ordered the compelling prostitution sentence to run consecutively after the sexual assault' sentence.

II. Exclusion op Facebook Evidence

In his second issue, 3 appellant contends the trial court abused its discretion during *724 the guilt and punishment phases of his trial by excluding evidence consisting of Amy’s posts on Facebook and related testimony. The trial court excluded twenty-four pages from Amy’s Facebook page. The posts were from September 2012 through the date of trial, but Amy testified outside the jury’s presence that the posts were similar to her posts from the time when she met appellant. Appellant contends the images and comments show Amy to be a “sexualized teenager” because she posted photos of herself “in various states of undress” 4 and proclaimed in one post, “I wanna have sex now © horny asFFFFF.” Appellant also contends the posts show Amy’s “experiments with sexuality” and preoccupation with money. 5

The State contends that the evidence was irrelevant during both phases of the trial. After reviewing general standards for relevancy, we address the admissibility of the Facebook evidence in each phase separately.

A. Relevancy Standards

We review a trial court’s ruling to exclude evidence under an abuse-of-discretion standard. Resendiz v. State, 112 S.W.3d 541, 544 (Tex.Crim.App.2003). We will not reverse the trial court’s ruling unless it falls outsize the zone of reasonable disagreement. Id

“Generally, all relevant evidence is admissible.” Layton v. State, 280 S.W.3d 235, 240 (Tex.Crim.App.2009) (citing Tex. R. Evid. 402). Evidence is relevant if it has “any tendency to make the existence of any fact that is of consequence to the determination of the action more probable or less probable than it would be without the evidence.” Tex. R. Evid. 401 (1998, repealed 2015). This definition is “necessarily a broad one.” Montgomery v. State, 810 S.W.2d 372, 391 (Tex.Crim.App. 1990) (op. on reh’g). Even “marginally probative” evidence should be admitted if “it has any tendency at all, even potentially, to make a fact of consequence more or less likely.” Fuller v. State, 829 S.W.2d 191,198 (Tex.Crim.App.1992).

To determine whether evidence is relevant in a particular case, courts must “examine the purpose for which the evidence is being introduced.”

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Kojuan J Miles v. State, 468 S.W.3d 719, 2015 Tex. App. LEXIS 6048 (Tex. Ct. App. 2015).

468 S.W.3d 719 (Kojuan J Miles v. State) — published by Counsel Stack Legal Research, free access to 12M+ legal documents.

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