State v. Draper

1

2024 UT App 152

State of Utah, Appellee, v. Tyler Robert Draper, Appellant.

No. 20210738-CA

Court of Appeals of Utah

October 24, 2024

Seventh District Court, Monticello Department The Honorable Don M. Torgerson No. 201700104.

Staci Visser and Ann Marie Taliaferro, Attorneys for Appellant

Sean D. Reyes, William M. Hains, Hwa Sung Doucette, and Michael Palumbo, Attorneys for Appellee

Judge Ryan D. Tenney authored this Opinion, in which Judges David N. Mortensen and Amy J. Oliver concurred.

OPINION

TENNEY, Judge

¶1 Tyler Draper was charged with six counts of rape and one count of aggravated assault. The charges were based on sexual encounters that Draper had with four young women that Draper knew from his hometown or the surrounding area. At the close of a four-day trial, the jury convicted Draper of four counts of rape, but it acquitted him on the remaining charges.

¶2 Draper appeals his convictions, raising several challenges to evidentiary rulings from the district court and several claims of ineffective assistance of counsel. Contemporaneous with his brief, Draper filed a request for a rule 23B remand in which he seeks to create a record to support many more ineffective assistance claims. For the reasons set forth below, we affirm Draper's convictions and deny his request for a rule 23B remand.

BACKGROUND

Draper's Relationships and Sexual Encounters with the Victims

¶3 In 2020, Tyler Draper was arrested and charged with six counts of rape and one count of aggravated assault.^[1] Each count involved a young woman whom Draper had dated or had been friends with during high school or in the years immediately afterward.^[2] ¶4 We recount the relevant circumstances surrounding each victim and her interactions with Draper below. In doing so we'll "recite the facts from the record in the light most favorable to the jury's verdict and present conflicting evidence only as necessary to understand issues raised on appeal." State v. Oreilly, 2024 UT App 79, n.1, 550 P.3d 500 (quotation simplified), cert denied, Sept. 12, 2024 (No. 202040790). Because this case resulted in a mixed verdict, wherein Draper was convicted on some charges but acquitted on others, we'll indicate whether particular allegations resulted in a conviction.

¶5 Helen. Helen and Draper are both from Monticello, which is a small town in southern Utah. Helen and Draper met in the summer of 2015 and started dating sometime later that year when Helen was a junior and Draper was a sophomore in high school. Helen and Draper began having consensual sex a month or two into their relationship. Helen later alleged that Draper had sexual intercourse with her on two occasions without her consent, and the jury convicted Draper of rape for each incident.

¶6 The first encounter occurred one night while Draper was visiting Helen at a chiropractor's office where she worked after hours doing the nightly cleaning. When Draper knocked on the door, Helen invited him in to "just sit with [her]." When Helen began cleaning again, Draper "stopped [her] and pushed [her] onto" a massage bench and started kissing her. Helen pushed Draper away and told him that she didn't want "to do this right now" because she was at work. Draper tried to persuade her by saying "they didn't have cameras," so "no one was going to find out and nobody would know." But Helen continued "pushing him and saying, no, [she] didn't want to do it there, because it was [her] work." Draper then "pushed" her so that she was "laying flat on [her] back," after which he pulled her jeans down and had sexual intercourse with her. Helen "just froze" and "just laid there" and cried during the encounter. After Draper was done, he "got up, pulled his pants back up[,] . . . buckled his belt and said, 'I have to leave now.'"

¶7 Helen continued dating Draper after the incident in the chiropractor's office, and she also continued having consensual sex with him. But another nonconsensual encounter happened a couple of months later while the two were alone at Draper's house. Helen "was sitting on the arm of the couch in his living room" when "he pushed [her] down onto the couch, so [she] was laying on [her] back." Helen didn't really understand what he was doing and "curled up into a ball in the fetal position." At that point, Draper "grabbed [her] knees, pulled them back over the arm of the couch, and pulled [her] pants down and held [her] legs down." Helen started "wiggling back and forth and trying to get out from under him," telling Draper that she didn't want to have sex "because at any moment any of his family members could walk into the house." Despite her protests, Draper proceeded to have sexual intercourse with her.

¶8 At trial, Helen did not offer much detail about how their relationship progressed after this incident, but she did say that the two broke up in "the spring of 2017."

¶9 Tori. Tori met Draper in July 2017. Tori was from the nearby town of Blanding, and Draper would often "sneak out" with other friends and meet her there. This went on for a few weeks, and Tori later said that, on these occasions, the two would "make out" and sometimes touch each other's genitals. But Tori also said that she was "very clear" with Draper that she "did not want to have sex" with him until she "was over 18" and that she had told Draper this "multiple times." Tori later testified that on one particular occasion, Draper had sexual intercourse with her even though she "told him no." Tori claimed that after Draper finished, she told him that "it was wrong" and that she "didn't like that he had done that." She said that in response, Draper told her that "he was sorry." Tori said that their relationship ended a short time later. The jury acquitted Draper of the rape charge that was based on this allegation.

¶10 Nora. Nora met Draper in October 2017, shortly after she moved to Monticello with her family. The two started out as friends, but by November or December of 2018, they were a couple. At that time, Nora was a junior in high school. Draper was attending college elsewhere in the state, but he would return to Monticello "every weekend." As their relationship progressed, the two became "more touchy." They would "make out" and Draper would sometimes "try to grab" Nora's "boobs" and "butt." According to Nora, Draper "started to kind of push . . . how far he could go" until Nora "would say . . . stop."

¶11 Nora later claimed that Draper had nonconsensual sex with her on two occasions, and Draper was charged with two counts of rape, one based on each alleged incident. The jury acquitted Draper on the allegation relating to the first incident, but it convicted him on the second.

¶12 The first incident occurred in December 2018. According to Nora's testimony at trial, Nora and Draper were watching a show in his basement and began kissing. Nora said that Draper tried to take her pants off but that she resisted. Nora said that the two eventually ended up in a spare bedroom and engaged in some "grinding." But Nora said that she repeatedly told Draper that she didn't want to have sexual intercourse and that Draper repeatedly assured her that they wouldn't. According to Nora, however, she then felt "penetration." When Nora told him, "I don't want to do this," Draper told her that it wasn't actually sex but was instead "docking." Nora later explained that she was naïve as to the specifics of sex so she was inclined to trust him. She also later testified that she didn't "remember much" about what happened during the remainder of this encounter but that she did "remember just crying."^[3] ¶13 The second incident (which resulted in a conviction) occurred in March 2019. On the night in question, Nora and Draper decided to take a late-night drive to a restaurant in Moab. On the drive, Nora "was leaning on his arm" and "occasionally kissing his cheek." At some point, Draper "took that as an invitation" and pulled over to the side of the road. Draper then moved over to Nora's side of the car and proceeded to hold her hands down and take off her pants. Nora responded by "fighting him," "hitting him in the face," and "saying, 'Stop. I don't want to do this right now.'" But Draper persisted, managed to get his pants off and her pants down below her knees, and then began "penetrating" her while "holding [her] hands down." Nora continued to fight back and was able to hit Draper in the head and face. Nora later testified that "[h]is face would change in this way where he couldn't hear" and that it "seem[ed] liked he just didn't care." Nora could not later recall if Draper "finished" or instead "just snapped back to reality," but regardless, she said that the incident left her scared and wanting to immediately go home.

¶14 Around June 2019, the two broke up. After their relationship ended, Nora told her sister what Draper had done to her. She also told the father of one of her friends, who suggested that Nora go to a victim advocate resource center (the Center). Nora did, and she later testified that this was the first professional help that she sought out.

¶15 Diane. Diane became close friends with Draper at the end of 2019 while she was a junior in high school and Draper was in college. By that time, some of the details about Nora and Draper's relationship had become public knowledge-including Nora's claim that Draper had raped her. Diane took it upon herself to "stand up for [Draper] when other people said negative things about him," and she also began to talk "a lot of crap" about Nora. Though Diane and Draper talked or communicated through texts or electronic apps "probably almost every day," Diane later said that she never had any romantic interest in Draper.

¶16 In March 2020, Diane was "hanging out with some friends"...