Smith's Criminal Case Compendium
Smith's Criminal Case Compendium
Table of Contents
Smith's Criminal Case Compendium
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This compendium includes significant criminal cases by the U.S. Supreme Court & N.C. appellate courts, Nov. 2008 – Present. Selected 4th Circuit cases also are included.
Jessica Smith prepared case summaries Nov. 2008-June 4, 2019; later summaries are prepared by other School staff.
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A defendant in a felony indecent exposure case under G.S. 14-190.9(a1) (person at least 18 years of age exposing private parts in the presence of a person less than 16) is not entitled to an instruction requiring the jury to find that the victim could have seen the exposed private part had the victim looked. Rather, it is sufficient for the instruction to explain that the jury must find beyond a reasonable doubt that the exposure was in the presence of another people. In this case, the defendant exposed himself to a woman while sitting in the driver’s seat of his car. Her child was playing nearby and the defendant was charged with felony indecent exposure for exposing himself in the presence of the child. The trial court refused to give the defendant’s requested jury instruction that for it to find that the defendant exposed himself in the presence of the child it must find that the child “could have seen [the exposure] had [he] looked,” and instead instructed that the element of the offense was satisfied if it found that the exposure “was in the presence of at least one other person.” Examining its analysis of a prior version of G.S. 14-190.9 in State v. Fly, 348 N.C. 556 (1998) and the plain language of the current statute, the court held:
[T]he requirement that the exposure be “in the presence of” the victim does not require a jury to find that the victim could have seen the exposed private parts had he or she looked. The statutory requirement that the exposure be in the presence of another focuses on where a defendant places himself relative to others; it concerns what the defendant does, not what the victim does or could do. See, e.g., Fly, 348 N.C. at 561, 501 S.E.2d at 659 (“The statute does not go to what the victim saw but to what defendant exposed in her presence without her consent.”). If a defendant exposes himself in public and has positioned himself so he is sufficiently close to someone under the age of sixteen, the presence element of subsection 14-190.9(a1) is satisfied.
The court went on to find that there was sufficient evidence in this case that the defendant’s exposure was in the presence of the child victim where the child was about twenty feet away from the defendant playing in the yard of the child’s home.
Where in the course of one instance the defendant exposed himself to multiple people, one of which was a minor and one of which was an adult, the defendant could not be found guilty of both misdemeanor indecent exposure under G.S. 14-190.9(a) and felonious indecent exposure under G.S. 14-190.9(a1). The misdemeanor indecent exposure statute provides in part: “Unless the conduct is punishable under subsection (a1) of this section” a person who exposes him or herself “in the presence of any other person or persons” shall be guilty of a class 2 misdemeanor. Subsection (a1) makes it a felony to expose oneself, in certain circumstances, to a person less than 16 years of age. The defendant was convicted of a felony under subsection (a1) because one of the victims was under 16. However, subsection (a), by its terms, forbids conduct from being the basis of a misdemeanor conviction if it is also punishable as felony indecent exposure. The court framed the issue as one of statutory construction, not double jeopardy.
(1) The trial court properly denied the defendant’s motion to dismiss in this felony indecent exposure case. The evidence showed that a neighbor and her 4-year-old daughter saw the defendant masturbating in front of his garage. The court rejected the defendant’s argument that because he was on his own property he was not in a “public place” within the meaning of the statute. The court noted that prior case law has held that a public place includes one that is open to the view of the public at large. Here, the defendant’s garage was directly off a public road and was in full view from the street and from the front of his neighbor’s house. (2) Where the neighbor and her daughter saw the defendant as they exited their car, the trial court did not commit plain error by failing to instruct the jury that the defendant must have been in view of the public with the naked eye and without resort to technological aids. Even if such an instruction may be appropriate in some cases here it was wholly unsupported by the evidence.