State v. Klein

342 P.3d 89, 267 Or. App. 348, 2014 Ore. App. LEXIS 1659
Court of Appeals of Oregon·Decided December 3, 2014·No. 12CR0436; A152463·Published·Cited by 3 cases

Opinion

SERCOMBE, P. J.

Defendant, who was convicted of first-degree criminal trespass, ORS 164.255, appeals, contending that the trial court erred in denying his motion for judgment of acquittal. He asserts that he did not unlawfully enter or remain in a dwelling as required for first-degree criminal trespass. As explained below, we agree that the trial court should have granted defendant’s motion for judgment of acquittal. Accordingly, we reverse.

In reviewing the denial of a motion for judgment of acquittal, we state the evidence in the light most favorable to the state. State v. Hall, 327 Or 568, 570, 966 P2d 208 (1998); State v. Alvarado, 257 Or App 612, 614, 307 P3d 540 (2013).

Defendant shared a mobile home with his mother (Nash), who rented a space for the mobile home in a mobile home park owned by Wilson. When Nash fell behind on the rent for the space, Wilson brought a legal proceeding against her and ultimately obtained a writ of execution returning the premises to his possession. A sheriffs deputy posted a notice that the occupants of the space had been “evicted by an order of the court” and that “trespassing or entering into or upon these premises without written consent of the landlord [would] result in arrest and prosecution.” (Capitalization omitted.) Thereafter, defendant reentered the mobile home, which remained in the space at the mobile home park. Wilson, who had not given defendant permission to enter the property, notified the police and, as a result, defendant was arrested and charged with first-degree criminal trespass.

At the close of the state’s case, defendant moved for a judgment of acquittal on the charge of first-degree criminal trespass. He contended that, although the landlord was entitled to possession of the real property, the mobile home was separate. According to defendant, “as long as his mother gave him permission to be in [the mobile home], *** they don’t have a Trespass I because that requires trespassing into the residence itself. And, granted, that you can’t be in the residence itself without being on the real property, but we feel as a matter of law that he did not commit Trespass I.” The trial court denied the motion, and the jury found defendant guilty of first-degree criminal trespass.

[351] On appeal from the resulting judgment, defendant renews the argument he made before the trial court. In particular, he contends that the “trial court erred when it denied [his] motion for judgment of acquittal because, though defendant unlawfully entered the premises and committed criminal trespass in the second degree, defendant did not unlawfully enter or remain in the dwelling, as required for criminal trespass in the first degree.” Defendant asserts that he “had license to enter the dwelling but not the premises.” Thus, “when defendant entered onto the landlord’s premises, he committed second degree criminal trespass. But when he continued into the dwelling,” that was not an additional unlawful entry. Rather, in his view, the landlord had “no property rights in the dwelling” and could exclude persons from it “only because it [was] located on the landlord’s real property.” The state, for its part, asserts that the writ of execution “granted the park owner lawful possession of the mobile home” and, accordingly, the park owner could “exclude others from the mobile home and not just the land it sits upon.” (Internal quotation marks omitted.) We agree with defendant.

Under ORS 164.255(1), a “person commits the crime of criminal trespass in the first degree if the person *** [e]nters or remains unlawfully in a dwellingi,]”1 (Emphasis added.) Under ORS 164.205(3)(a), the phrase “[e]nter or remain unlawfully” is defined as entering or remaining “in or upon premises when the premises, at the time of such entry or remaining, are not open to the public or when the entrant is not otherwise licensed or privileged to do so[.]” That definition was “intended to ground the crime of criminal trespass in traditional property law[.]” State v. Hall, 181 Or App 536, 539, 47 P3d 55 (2002). Thus, “when a person had received an invitation from the owner of the property to enter, consistently with the principles of common-law trespass, that invitation generally is sufficient to establish that the entrant was ‘licensed or privileged’ to do so[.]” Id. As the Supreme Court explained in State v. Hartfield, 290 Or 583, 595, 624 P2d 588 (1981),

[352] “ [wjhere one is permitted or invited to enter premises, not open to the public, the state must prove two elements in order to establish that his entry is ‘not otherwise licensed or privileged.’ The state must prove that the person extending the permission or invitation was without actual authority to do so and that the entrant knew or believed there was no such actual authority.”

Similarly, as defendant points out, a person who has no property rights in a dwelling “cannot exclude the dwelling’s owner from it for the purposes of the” first-degree criminal trespass statute. “As a general rule, one of the incidents of property ownership is the right in invite other persons to use property or, conversely, to exclude them from doing so.” Hall, 181 Or App at 540.

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State v. Klein, 342 P.3d 89, 267 Or. App. 348, 2014 Ore. App. LEXIS 1659 (Or. Ct. App. 2014).

342 P.3d 89 (State v. Klein) — published by Counsel Stack Legal Research, free access to 12M+ legal documents.

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