State v. Arreola

554 P.3d 684

STATE of Kansas, Appellee,

v.Daniel A. ARREOLA, Appellant.

No. 124,612

Court of Appeals of Kansas.

Opinion Filed August 23, 2024.

Appeal from Shawnee District Court; David B. Debenham, judge. Submitted without oral argument.

Corrine E. Gunning, of Kansas Appellate Defender Office, for appellant.

Carolyn A. Smith, assistant district attorney, Michael F. Kagay, district attorney, and Kris W. Kobach, attorney general, for appellee.

Before Arnold-Burger, C.J., Malone and Warner, JJ.

Warner, J.:

Daniel Arreola was convicted of several crimes after he broke into an apartment and attacked people inside. He appeals, challenging various aspects of the evidence presented at trial, the district court’s instructions to the jury, and the prosecutor’s closing argument, as well as the constitutionality of the statutory definitions of rape and aggravated criminal sodomy. We are unpersuaded by Arreola’s constitutional claim. And after carefully reviewing the record and the parties’ arguments, we conclude that Arreola’s trial, though not perfect in all respects, was fair. We thus affirm his convictions.

Factual and Procedural Background

On a July evening in 2015, three women hosted a party at their first-floor apartment in Topeka. The party lasted well into the night, with partygoers drinking alcohol and mingling inside the apartment and outside on a back patio, which was connected to the apartment’s kitchen by a sliding glass door.

Sometime during the party, one of the hosts and a guest were talking on the patio. Arreola approached them and asked if he could join the party. They told him he could if he stayed on the patio outside. Several times throughout the night, Arreola made his way into the apartment and was told to leave. After the hosts were forced to ask Arreola to go back outside a third time, one of them locked the sliding glass door so he could not reenter. A guest recalled that Arreola "didn’t put up much confrontation" and was disagreeable but not forcefully so—he acted in a way that "you would expect from a drunk person."

Around 4 a.m., Arreola started yelling from outside the glass door that he was going to break in. A guest tried to calm him down, but Arreola pulled out a gun and pressed it against the glass, pointing it at the people inside and repeating that he was going to break in. The guest immediately told everyone that Arreola was armed and to move away from the door and out of the kitchen.

Arreola kicked the door and made his way inside the apartment. He then started yelling that he "was FBI" and that if anyone moved, he would shoot them. Arreola approached the guest he had spoken with on the patio earlier—now lying on the floor behind a couch in the living room—and pressed the gun to the back of the guest’s neck, telling him not to move or he would be shot. Another person who had been hiding in the living room started running down the hallway toward one of the bedrooms, and Arreola began chasing him. The guest in the living room then ran out the sliding back door and into the parking lot. Arreola initially chased him outside but quickly gave up and went back into the apartment. The escaped guest called 911.

Back inside the apartment, Arreola approached the bedroom of one of the hosts (L.M.) where she and a guest (C.T.) were hiding. Arreola forced his way inside and told the two women to lie on the ground. Arreola climbed on top of C.T., put his gun to her chest, and told her that "he was FBI, and this was just protocol." He started going through C.T.’s pockets, and L.M. told Arreola to leave her alone. Arreola then went over to L.M., put his gun to the back of her head, pulled down her sweatpants and underwear, and forcibly penetrated her vagina and anus with his penis. While on top of L.M., Arreola pointed his gun at C.T. and said, "Don’t fucking look at me."

In the meantime, Topeka police officers arrived at the scene. Hearing the officers, Arreola got off L.M. and flashed his gun outside the bedroom door at the officers. The officers withdrew from the apartment to establish a strategic position. Amid the turmoil, Arreola fled. Officers found him banging on another apartment door—three apartments down from where the incident occurred—and arrested him.

The officers took Arreola to the police station. He was interviewed by a detective, who testified at trial that Arreola appeared drunk and that much of what he said during the interview did not make sense. For example, when asked if he raped anyone, Arreola answered that he "was not raped by an officer." The detective also testified that Arreola said that he did not know what he had done that night.

Arreola was charged with several crimes. The case proceeded to trial, where the jury found Arreola guilty of aggravated burglary, three counts of aggravated assault with a deadly weapon, aggravated criminal sodomy, rape, and unlawful tampering with an electronic monitoring device—a crime Arreola was charged with after he removed his GPS monitor and fled Kansas while released on bond. Arreola was sentenced to 257 months’ imprisonment.

Discussion

Arreola raises several arguments on appeal. He asserts that the jury instruction on aggravated burglary was faulty because it listed alternative means of committing that offense. He also claims that the district court should have instructed the jury on the potential effect that his voluntary intoxication had on his ability to form the specific intent required to commit aggravated burglary. And he asserts the prosecutor erred during closing arguments; that the statutes criminalizing rape and aggravated criminal sodomy are unconstitutional; and that the aggrega- tion of these errors denied him a fair trial. We agree that an instruction on voluntary intoxication was legally and factually appropriate in this case. But the absence of that instruction was not a clear error that affected the outcome of the trial. And we are not persuaded by Arreola’s remaining arguments. We therefore affirm his convictions.

1. Arreola has not shown reversible error in the district court’s jury instructions.

Arreola challenges two aspects of the district court’s instructions to the jury. He asserts that the court’s instruction on aggravated burglary included alternative means of committing that offense that were not proved by the State beyond a reasonable doubt. And he claims that the court should have instructed the jury on voluntary intoxication to help the jury assess whether he could have formed the specific intent necessary to commit that crime. Arreola acknowledges that he neither objected to the aggravated-burglary instruction nor requested a voluntary-intoxication instruction. But he asserts that these alleged errors so clearly affected the outcome of his trial that they require a new trial for the aggravated-burglary charge.

[1, 2] When faced with a claim that an instruction should have been altered or that an unrequested instruction should have been given at trial, we must determine whether the instruction was appropriate under the law and whether it fit the evidence presented. State v. Holley, 313 Kan. 249, 254, 485 P.3d 614 (2021). If so, we consider whether the district court’s instructions require reversal. State v. Gentry, 310 Kan. 715, 720, 449 P.3d 429 (2019). A person raising an instructional deficiency for the first time on appeal, as Arreola is here, did not allow the district court the opportunity to assess whether the instruction should have been given in the first instance. Thus, they must demonstrate that the absence of the instruction was clearly erroneous—that is, they must firmly convince the appellate court that the jury would have reached a different verdict if the instruction had been given. K.S.A. 22-3414(3); State v. Craig, 311 Kan. 456, 464, 462 P.3d 173 (2020); Gentry, 310 Kan. at 720-21, 449 P.3d 429.

1.1. The district court’s instruction on aggravated burglary was legally and factually appropriate.

Arreola argues that the district court’s instruction on aggravated burglary listed alternative means of committing that offense, triggering a higher evidentiary standard that the State had to meet for him to be convicted of that crime. Arreola notes that the district court did not instruct the jury to this effect; he asserts that the evidence presented did not otherwise meet the State’s burden of proof.

The district court instructed the jury that, for the crime of aggravated burglary, the State was required to prove:

"1. The defendant entered a dwelling.

"2. The defendant did so without authority.

"3. The defendant did so with the intent to commit rape, aggravated assault, theft, or aggravated criminal sodomy therein."

Arreola did not object to this instruction. But on appeal, he claims that the specific criminal intents the court listed in its instruction—that Arreola entered with the intent to commit rape, aggravated assault, theft, or aggravated criminal sodomy—provided alternative means of committing aggravated burglary. He asserts the State was required to prove each of these possible intents beyond a reasonable doubt to avoid reversal. See State v. Wright, 290 Kan. 194, 224 P.3d 1159 (2010) (super sufficiency test), overruled by State v. Reynolds, 319 Kan. —, 552 P.3d 1 (2024).

[3, 4] When the State charges a person with a crime that can be committed in more than one way, it may present evidence of alternative means of committing that offense. Reynolds, 319 Kan. at —, 552 P.3d 1, 5. A district court presents an alternative-means crime to a jury when its instructions "incorporate multiple means for a single statutory element" of an offense. 319 Kan. at —, 552 P.3d at 5.

Arreola’s case involves such a crime. To prove aggravated burglary under K.S.A. 2015 Supp. 21-5807(b), the State was required to demonstrate that Arreola entered the apart- ment "without authority … with intent to commit a felony, theft or sexually motivated crime therein." The district court narrowed this definition somewhat...