State v. Woods , 2014 Ohio 3912 ( 2014 )

[Cite as State v. Woods, 2014-Ohio-3912.]
Court of Appeals of Ohio
EIGHTH APPELLATE DISTRICT
COUNTY OF CUYAHOGA
JOURNAL ENTRY AND OPINION
No. 100677
STATE OF OHIO
PLAINTIFF-APPELLEE
vs.
ALLEN WOODS
DEFENDANT-APPELLANT
JUDGMENT:
AFFIRMED
Criminal Appeal from the
Cuyahoga County Court of Common Pleas
Case No. CR-12-568127-A
BEFORE: Rocco, J., Boyle, A.J., and E.A. Gallagher, J.
RELEASED AND JOURNALIZED: September 11, 2014
-i-
ATTORNEY FOR APPELLANT
Brooke Deines
Law Office of Brooke Deines L.L.C.
857 Starkweather Avenue
Cleveland, Ohio 44113
ATTORNEYS FOR APPELLEE
Timothy J. McGinty
Cuyahoga County Prosecutor
By: Brent C. Kirvel
Assistant Prosecuting Attorney
The Justice Center
1200 Ontario Street
Cleveland, Ohio 44113
KENNETH A. ROCCO, J.:
{¶1} Defendant-appellant Allen Woods appeals from his conviction after a jury
found him guilty of importuning. He presents a single assignment of error, claiming that
his conviction is against the manifest weight of the evidence.
{¶2} This court has reviewed the record with his claim in mind, but cannot find
merit to his assertion. Consequently, his assignment of error is overruled, and his
conviction is affirmed.
{¶3} At trial, the victim provided the following account of the incident that led to
Woods’s conviction.
{¶4} The victim was born on September 28, 1996. On a September morning just
prior to her sixteenth birthday, she was walking to school in the Collinwood
neighborhood of Cleveland when a pickup truck pulled up nearby and stopped. The
driver, Allen Woods,1 got out and approached the victim. As Woods did so, the victim
noticed that a passenger remained in the truck. The passenger, who went by the initials
“JR,”2 was a good-looking young man of approximately the victim’s age. The victim
was intrigued by JR.
{¶5} Woods told the victim he wanted to talk to her. When she responded that he
was too old for her, Woods told her that “age was nothing but a number.” The victim
and JR exchanged smiles and waves while Woods was speaking, so Woods took
1The record reflects Woods’s date of birth is June 4, 1976.
2JR’s actual name was Willie McQueen; he testified for the state at trial.
advantage of her interest and asked the victim if he could have her telephone number.
Intending that JR have it, the victim complied.
{¶6} Woods telephoned the victim that evening. When he told her that he wanted
to “meet up” with her, she explained to him that she wanted to meet his young friend.
The conversation was short.
{¶7} However, Woods appeared again the following day. The victim continued
walking to school as Woods called out to her to “come back.” She stopped long enough
to tell him that she had to go to school; she resisted his entreaties to leave with him.
{¶8} Approximately a week later, while the victim was in class, she received a
telephone call from JR. He told her that he wanted to see her, and that Woods would
pick her up at the nearby fast-food restaurant after school to bring her to him. She
agreed. In order to disguise her intent, the victim then informed her father that she was
going to remain after school to study.
{¶9} Woods met the victim as arranged. He drove her to his home in Cleveland
Heights, where he offered her a drink that she refused. The victim was dismayed to
notice that JR was not present; indeed, when JR came to Woods’s door, Woods turned
him away. Instead, Woods made sexual advances toward the victim.
{¶10} The victim resisted Woods’s advances and repeated her desire to see JR.
Woods ultimately relented and made a call. JR, who lived next door, returned; this time,
Woods let him inside and the three of them began conversing. The victim noticed that
her father was calling her during this time but she did not answer her phone.
{¶11} Eventually, the victim agreed to sit on JR’s lap, whereupon, without any
reaction from JR, Woods again made sexual advances toward her. The victim pushed
Woods away.
{¶12} At that point, Woods proposed a “game.” He told the victim that he would
pretend to be a police officer and she would be a marijuana suspect. Woods directed the
victim to stand against the wall while he “frisked” her. Woods touched the victim on her
breasts and her “private area” as he played this game. Then both Woods and JR
attempted to undress the victim but she obstructed their efforts.
{¶13} When JR proposed to the victim that they go upstairs, she accepted readily,
thinking to remove herself from the situation. She first went into the bathroom hoping to
find an escape route, but the window would not open. She then followed JR into
“Allen’s room.”
{¶14} Once there, JR surprised the victim by giving her a hard push so that she fell
onto the bed, whereupon JR stripped her pants from her, underwear included, and left the
room with them. The victim grabbed the bedcovers to wrap around herself and followed
him back downstairs.
{¶15} The victim asked JR to return her clothing. JR, however, remained out of
reach while Woods attempted to “yank the cover” from the victim, then JR told her to go
upstairs because “he had a condom.” The victim obeyed on the hope that JR would leave
her pants in a place where she could retrieve them.
{¶16} After the victim reentered the bedroom with him, JR held the victim down
and attempted to have intercourse with her but could not. When he gave up, Woods
came into the room and asked the victim if he could “lick [her] private area.” Although
she refused, he made an effort that she foiled by “kicking.”
{¶17} JR finally asked her “why [was she] playing?” The victim insisted that she
did not want to “have sex with both of them.” Apparently now aware that she was
unwilling, the men finally left her alone. She got dressed, went downstairs where she
retrieved her phone, and asked Woods if he was taking her home. Woods told her he
would do that if she let him “lick [her] private part.” The victim walked out.
{¶18} At some distance away, the victim called 911. She informed the dispatcher
that two men attempted to have sex with her and that “they came.” Police officers
arrived at her location soon afterward. The victim pointed out Woods’s house before she
was taken to the police station to make a written statement. Her mother then took her to
the hospital for an examination.
{¶19} As a result of the victim’s accusations, Woods was indicted in this case on
five counts. He was charged with kidnapping with a sexual motivation specification,
importuning, and three counts of gross sexual imposition. Woods took his case to a jury
trial. After considering the evidence, the jury found Woods not guilty of four of the
charges, but guilty of importuning. The trial court sentenced Woods to a year of
conditional community control, and notified him that he was classified as a Tier I child
sex offender.
{¶20} Woods appeals from his conviction with the following assignment of error.
I. Appellant’s convictions are [sic] against the manifest weight of the evidence.
{¶21} In his assignment of error, Woods argues that the victim presented so many
different versions of the incident that none of her stories was worthy of belief. He thus
contends that the jury “lost its way” in considering the evidence. Upon a review of the
record, this court disagrees.
{¶22} The Ohio Supreme Court has “carefully distinguished” the terms sufficiency
and weight of the evidence in criminal cases, declaring that they are “both quantitatively
and qualitatively different.” Eastley v. Volkman, 132 Ohio St. 3d 328, 2012-Ohio-2179,
972 N.E.2d 517, ¶ 10, citing State v. Thompkins, 78 Ohio St. 3d 380, 1997-Ohio-52, 678
N.E.2d 541 (1997), paragraph two of the syllabus.
{¶23} Unlike a review of the sufficiency of the evidence, an appellate court’s
function when reviewing the weight of the evidence is to determine whether the greater
amount of credible evidence supports the verdict. Volkman at ¶ 12; Thompkins at 387.
In reviewing whether the jury’s verdict was against the weight of the evidence, the
appellate court sits as a “thirteenth juror” and examines the conflicting testimony. Id.
In doing so, this court examines the entire record, weighs the evidence and all of the
reasonable inferences to be made, considers the credibility of witnesses, and determines
whether in resolving conflicts in the evidence, the jury “clearly lost its way and created
such a manifest miscarriage of justice that the conviction must be reversed and a new trial
ordered.” Id.
{¶24} This court must remain mindful, however, that the weight of the evidence
and the credibility of witnesses are matters primarily for the jury to assess. State v.
DeHass, 10 Ohio St. 2d 230, 227 N.E.2d 212 (1967). Only in exceptional cases, where
the evidence “weighs heavily against the conviction,” should an appellate court overturn
the verdict. Thompkins at 388. That situation is not presented in the instant case.
{¶25} The jury found Woods guilty of the charge of importuning in violation of
R.C. 2907.07(B). That statute provides:
(B)(1) No person shall solicit another, not the spouse of the offender, to engage in
sexual conduct with the offender, when the offender is eighteen years of age or older and
four or more years older than the other person, and the other person is thirteen years of
age or older but less than sixteen years of age, whether or not the offender knows the age
of the other person.
{¶26} Woods presents no challenge to the evidence that proved that at the time the incident
occurred, the victim was not yet sixteen years old, and that Woods was more than four years her elder.3
Instead, he asserts that the victim’s testimony about the incident itself simply was unworthy of belief.
{¶27} Woods makes this assertion by focusing on the many varying details the
victim provided over the course of the investigation into her allegations. In reviewing
3 The victim provided her date of birth during her testimony. The detective who
investigated the incident testified that Woods was born in 1976. State v. Mansfield, 11th Dist.
Lake No. 2007-L-173, 2008-Ohio-3989; State v. Hines, 8th Dist. Cuyahoga No. 90871,
2009-Ohio-2118; State v. Weir, 2d Dist. Montgomery No. 22052, 2007-Ohio-6671. In addition,
JR testified that Woods mainly associated with people in their “30s or 40s,” i.e., people his own
age.
the totality of the evidence, however, the record clearly demonstrates that the victim never
changed her version of the portion of the incident that served as the basis for the crime of
importuning. The victim testified that Woods asked her if he could perform oral sex
upon her vaginal area. Because the several statements she gave to the adults who
questioned her about the incident corroborated her testimony in this particular detail, the
jury did not lose its way in finding Woods guilty of importuning. State v. Kent, 8th Dist.
Cuyahoga No. 98863, 2013-Ohio-2461, ¶ 20; State v. Anderson, 8th Dist. Cuyahoga No.
88035, 2007-Ohio-822, ¶ 19.
{¶28} Wood’s assignment of error, accordingly, is overruled.
{¶29} His conviction is affirmed.
It is ordered that appellee recover from appellant costs herein taxed.
The court finds there were reasonable grounds for this appeal.
It is ordered that a special mandate issue out of this court directing the common
pleas court to carry this judgment into execution. The defendant’s conviction having
been affirmed, any bail pending appeal is terminated. Case remanded to the trial court
for execution of sentence.
A certified copy of this entry shall constitute the mandate pursuant to Rule 27 of
the Rules of Appellate Procedure.
______________________________________
KENNETH A. ROCCO, JUDGE
MARY J. BOYLE, A.J., and
EILEEN A. GALLAGHER, J., CONCUR