State v. Scarborough

300 S.W.3d 717, 2009 Tenn. Crim. App. LEXIS 191, 2009 WL 691894
CourtCourt of Criminal Appeals of Tennessee
DecidedMarch 17, 2009
DocketE2007-01856-CCA-R3-CD
StatusPublished
Cited by16 cases

This text of 300 S.W.3d 717 (State v. Scarborough) is published on Counsel Stack Legal Research, covering Court of Criminal Appeals of Tennessee primary law. Counsel Stack provides free access to over 12 million legal documents including statutes, case law, regulations, and constitutions.

Bluebook
State v. Scarborough, 300 S.W.3d 717, 2009 Tenn. Crim. App. LEXIS 191, 2009 WL 691894 (Tenn. Ct. App. 2009).

Opinion

OPINION

JOSEPH M. TIPTON, P.J,

delivered the opinion of the court,

in which JERRY L. SMITH and NORMA McGEE OGLE, JJ., joined.

The defendant, Bruce Warren Scarborough, was convicted by a Knox County Criminal Court jury of two counts of aggravated rape, Class A felonies, and was sentenced to consecutive terms of sixty years as a career offender in the Department of Correction. On appeal, he argues that the trial court erred in (1) denying his motion to suppress the in-court and out-of-court identifications of him and his tattoos, (2) failing to grant a new trial due to prosecutorial misconduct during closing argument, (3) classifying him as a career offender, and (4) ordering consecutive sentences. After review, we affirm the judgments of the trial court.

This case involves the June 1997 vaginal and anal raping of the victim, K. R., for which the defendant was charged in August 2005 by presentment 1 with two counts of aggravated rape.

The trial was conducted on November 13-15, 2006. At the trial, the victim testified that in 1997 she lived alone at 4601 Bob White Road in Knoxville. She recalled that sometime that spring she began experiencing “kind of a creepy feeling. I thought perhaps I was being watched.” She remembered an incident one evening approximately seven to ten days before the rape when she was napping on the sofa and “woke with a start and ... saw a flash of what looked like a white t-shirt across the living room window.” The victim stated that she told her mother that she needed “some sort of protection” and was considering buying a baseball bat, although she never did.

The victim testified that on June 3,1997, she was at home with “a horrible case of laryngitis” and a friend brought her some cold medication around 4:30 p.m. The victim recalled that “[i]t did not register with [her]” that she did not lock the door when her friend left. The victim stated that during the night she was awakened by the sound of the door closing and heard footsteps on the hardwood floor. The victim remembered that she looked at the clock and it was around 3:30 a.m., and then she saw a figure standing in the doorway. The victim stated that with the hallway and living room lights on, the lighting was behind the figure. She recalled that the figure filled the majority of the doorway.

*720 The victim testified that she “bolted upright and with laryngitis was screaming, “Who are you?’ ” She recalled that the figure “rushed” at her, leapt onto her legs and torso, and used his arms to restrain her. She said she struggled and tried to scream while trying to make sense of what was happening. The victim stated she realized what was happening when the man began to rip off her clothes. She noted that he smelled “[v]ery strongly of greasy body odor” and that there was nothing familiar about him.

The victim testified that the man told her to hold still and not scream while he covered her eyes with his hand. She stated that the man pulled a piece of tape off his upper arm and used it to cover her face. She remembered that the man told her that he had a knife, that he would use it, and that he would cut her up. The victim testified that she then heard a rustle and felt the man touch her with plastic on his hands. She said that while he was touching her, he said, “I’m going to get you_You just hold still. You’re going to like this.” She noted that the more she tried to pull away from him, “the more excited he got and the harder he would rape [her].”

The victim testified that shortly after the man began raping her, he took a pillowcase off one of her pillows, put it over her head, and “noosed it really tightly.” The victim recalled that she lied and told the man she had herpes in an effort to disgust him and also tried to make herself vomit. She said she began to pray aloud. The victim said that she went limp and did not fight him, which “wasn’t as pleasing. So, he turned [her] over and began to sodomize [her].” She said that the man grabbed some Ruhl Gel, an “anti-itch, bug bite” medication, from her bedside table and rubbed it on her vagina. She noted that she did not know she could feel pain “quite like that.” The victim stated that sometime prior to the man raping her, he tried to kiss her and “said something about wanting oral sex,” but she refused. The victim estimated that the initial rape lasted twenty-five to thirty minutes and that she was sodomized twice. She recalled that the man did not wear a condom.

The victim testified that she was able to make out the man’s figure, shape of his haircut, his hair, and moustache as he was running toward her bed. She recalled that toward the end of the attack, while she was being sodomized, the tape came off her eyes under the pillowcase and she was able to see tattoos on the man’s arms. The victim said that she focused on the man’s arms “for a minute and a half to two minutes,” knowing she needed to be able to identify him if she survived. She stated that she looked behind her at the man’s face through a gape in the pillowcase. She said she observed his eyes, eyebrows, cheekbones, and moustache for “[p]robably half a minute.” She said that she noticed he was wearing a blue button-down shirt, a velcro-banded watch with a black band and blue trim around the edges and that she got an overall feel for his weight and age.

The victim testified that after the rape, the man put his pants back on as she lay naked “in the fetal position on [her] bed.” She remembered that the man pulled her up, grabbed the back of the pillowcase tightly, and walked her down the hallway to the bathroom. She stated that he made her get into the shower with the pillowcase still over her head, poured liquid soap onto her hand, and told her “to clean that pussy real good. He didn’t want nobody to find nothing. To clean it real good.” She recalled that as she was washing herself, the man told her that he would be watching her house for a few weeks and if he saw any police cars he would come back and kill her. The victim said she washed her *721 self for five to ten seconds and then became aware that the man was gone. She stated that she heard footsteps across the living room floor and the glass front door close and that she turned off the water and listened for a car but never heard a car start.

The victim testified that she retrieved a telephone from her bedroom and locked herself in the bathroom. She said she called 9-1-1 and reported that a stranger had entered her house and raped her. She recalled that officers arrived on the scene in “[j]ust a matter of minutes” and began securing the scene. The victim said she was taken by ambulance to the hospital where a rape kit was conducted. She said she went to the police station later that morning and gave a statement. The victim stated that she worked with an officer to create a composite of her attacker and that she drew a freehand representation of her attacker’s tattoos. She said that she drew the overall image of the tattoo on her attacker’s left arm, including the shape, coloration, and pattern but that she did not know what it was specifically. At this point in the victim’s testimony, the defendant was asked to show the victim his arms, and she identified his tattoos as those of her attacker.

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Cite This Page — Counsel Stack

Bluebook (online)
300 S.W.3d 717, 2009 Tenn. Crim. App. LEXIS 191, 2009 WL 691894, Counsel Stack Legal Research, https://law.counselstack.com/opinion/state-v-scarborough-tenncrimapp-2009.