Rape, sodomy, assault: 3 in Missouri win retrials, faced accusers by video during COVID
The details in the three Missouri cases are horrific.
In one, a Jackson County 12-year-old is alleged to have sodomized a 5-year-old girl. In the second, a 14-year-old boy is accused of being involved in the shooting of an 18-year-old in Grandview, a homeless teen selling marijuana out of his car. In the third, a St. Louis-area man, Rodney A. Smith, was accused of the statutory rape of the 16-year-old daughter of his girlfriend.
Smith was found guilty. The two juveniles were judged in Family Court to have committed the acts.
But on Tuesday, the Missouri Supreme Court ruled that each of the three deserve to be retried because, during COVID, they faced some of their accusers or witnesses via video rather than face-to-face. The cases had been appealed on the grounds that, COVID notwithstanding, the defendants in each case were denied their rights under the Sixth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution and the Missouri Constitution to confront the witnesses against them at trial.
The state high court agreed. As COVID raged, the court set out specific criteria that allowed in-person hearings or trials to be suspended. Those reasons could not override one’s constitutional rights.
“There is a constitutional right to confront the witnesses against you,” said Jeff Esparza, an attorney for the Missouri State Public Defender’s Office who filed the appeals in both the juvenile cases. “That doesn’t just mean cross-examining them. There is an ineffable quality about seeing someone on a video screen that is not the same as looking at them in the eye. . . I think there is just a kind of dehumanization that comes from a video screen. And when you are accused of a serious offense and your liberty could be taken away, there is exactly one thing that the Constitution requires that you be able to do in terms of those witnesses: Look him in the eye.”
Although all the cases involved video testimony, each differed in notable ways.
In June 2020, a juvenile identified in court documents by the initials C.A.R.A. was tried in Jackson County Family Court. The alleged incident occurred in 2019, when C.A.R.A allegedly sexually assaulted the 5-year-old using his hands under a blanket as they sat on a couch.
C.A.R.A. requested to be tried in court in-person, but instead the court used “a hybrid format,” in which the boy, his attorney and the judge were in the courtroom, but all other witnesses testified via two-way video. The boy was subsequently convicted of the equivalent of first-degree statutory sodomy.
The Supreme Court ruled: “The circuit court violated C.A.RA.’s constitutional rights to confrontation by admitting the witnesses’ two-way live video testimony.”
In the second case, a teen, J.A.T., was accused of the January shooting of 18-year-old Dalvon Stines. Stines, who was shot six times, lived but was critically injured. In this case, J.A.T. requested that he appear in person in court. Over his objections, the circuit court required him to appear via two-way video from a detention center. All other participants, including the attorneys for both sides, the judge, the boy’s parents, several witnesses and members of the Juvenile Office were in court in person.
The court again said the boy’s constitutional rights were violated.
“The adjudication hearing was J.A.T’s opportunity to defend himself against the juvenile officer’s accusations,” the court stated in its opinion. “(B)y requiring him to attend via two-way video, the circuit court denied him the crucial right to be physically present at the stage of the proceedings critical to its outcome — the determination of guilt or innocence. . . Further, this court’s COVID-19 directives did not permit adjudication hearings to be conducted via two-way video.”
The adult case out of St. Louis, meantime, involved video testimony related to family medical leave, although COVID was invoked in the defense’s appeal.
It involved a witness giving DNA testimony over two-way video. In the case, State of Missouri v. Rodney A. Smith, Smith in 2018 was charged with the sexual assault of his girlfriend’s then-16-year-old daughter. The daughter would later recant the allegation, but the DNA in her sexual assault kit matched Smith’s.
The court allowed the state’s witness, Erik Hall, who could not attend court because he was on family medical leave, to present the DNA report over two-way video. In August 2019, Smith was declared guilty of two counts of statutory rape. He was sentenced to seven years in prison, but the sentence was suspended. Smith was placed on probation.
The Supreme Court reversed the judgment. In her appeal, assistant public defender Nina McDonnell made invoked COVID.
“Prior to March of 2020, it might have been arguable that video testimony is the functional equivalent to in-person testimony in a courtroom,” she wrote. “But, the global COVID-19 pandemic has laid bare what courts that had refused such testimony previously to March of 2020 suspected: that two-way video systems fall short of face-to-face confrontation because they ‘do not produce the same truth-inducing effect’ as in person testimony.”
In its opinion, the Missouri Supreme Court stated: “The circuit court violated Smith’s constitutional right.”
This story was originally published January 13, 2022 at 5:00 AM.
