United States v. Doak

47 F.4th 1340

UNITED STATES of America, Plaintiff-Appellee-Cross Appellant,

v.Mack DOAK, Defendant-Appellant,Jaycee Doak, Defendant-Appellant-Cross Appellee.

No. 19-15106

United States Court of Appeals, Eleventh Circuit.

Filed: September 7, 2022

Scott Alan Gray, Sinan Kalayoglu, Justin David Roller, U.S. Attorney Service - Southern District of Alabama, U.S. Attorney's Office, Mobile, AL, for Plaintiff-Appellee-Cross Appellant.

Latisha Vanese Colvin, Kristen Gartman Rogers, Carlos Alfredo Williams, Federal Defender's Office, Mobile, AL, for Defendant-Appellant.

Arthur J. Madden, III, Madden & Soto, Mobile, AL, for Defendant-Appellant Cross Appellee.

Before Grant, Luck, and Hull, Circuit Judges.

Grant, Circuit Judge:

Mack Doak was convicted by a jury of transporting his three adopted daughters across state lines so that he could sexually abuse them. From the time he adopted the girls until family members finally reported him five years later he subjected them to relentless abuse.

Mack's wife Jaycee knew what he was doing. Her adopted daughters confided in her after Mack abused them, but she refused to help. She denied their allegations. She also yelled at the girls, blamed them for the abuse, and helped Mack travel across the country to keep his acts hidden. The jury convicted her of aiding and abetting.

The Doaks make an across-the-board effort to challenge their convictions, claiming that their indictment was flawed and that several evidentiary errors infected the trial. Mack also challenges the district court's restitution calculation and its finding that he could afford a special assessment. On cross-appeal, the government argues that Jaycee's sentence—the statutory minimum—was substantively unreasonable. Other than the restitution order, which we partially vacate, we affirm the Doaks’ convictions and sentences.

I.

The tragic history of the Doak family began in Rhode Island, where 27-year-old Mack Doak met 18-year-old Jaycee Thet. Despite the age gap, the two began a romantic relationship. Mack's interests, however, extended beyond Jaycee. While at work as a city bus driver, he had his eyes set on one of his regular passengers: 14-year-old Nicole.¹ Mack eventually introduced himself to Nicole and became very attentive, lavishing her with gifts on Valentine's Day and taking her to Boston for dinner. Nicole (unaware of Mack's relationship with Jaycee) came to believe that she was Mack's girlfriend—and that she owed him physical intimacy. She began having sex with him almost every time they met, but then Jaycee and Nicole learned about each other. Mack told Jaycee that he planned to leave her for 14-year-old Nicole, but Jaycee got Nicole's father involved. Nicole ended her relationship with Mack, but she never reported Mack to the police. Around the same time, Jaycee gave birth to the couple's first daughter.

Meanwhile, Mack also used his relationship with Jaycee to get closer to her younger sister Natalie, who was in elementary school. After Natalie turned ten or eleven, Mack began groping her—constantly touching "anything that he could"—including her breasts, her buttocks, and her genitals. The abuse progressed over several years until one day, when Natalie was laying on the couch sick, he offered to rub a balm on her back. As he was applying the balm, he tried to pull down her pants. When Natalie, who was 12 or 13 years old, asked Mack what he was doing he told her to be quiet. He pulled down her pants and raped her. She kept silent and told no one for years.

Not long after he raped her little sister, Mack married Jaycee and they moved to Rosharon, Texas with Jaycee's family. Natalie moved with them, but she did not remain silent indefinitely. Nearly a decade after the move, Natalie told her family that Mack had abused her, confronting Mack directly in the process. Jaycee, however, leapt to Mack's defense, and threatened that if Natalie reported him to the police, she would report her for stealing scratch-off lottery tickets from Jaycee and Mack's store. Natalie backed down.

Around that same time, Mack and Jaycee adopted six siblings, including three girls who became victims: Brenda (11), Laura (9), and Leah (6). Right after the children moved in with their new parents, Mack started "touching" both Brenda and Laura.

The abuse was abhorrent. Laura remembers that one night, as she slept next to Brenda, she woke up to Mack touching her genitals. Mack stripped her naked, and Laura felt him push his hand "inside [her] body." The assault was so "scary" that Laura kept silent and tried to forget about it. On another night, Brenda awoke to Mack touching her, pulling down her pants, and raping her. He held her down and ignored her pleas for him to stop. Jaycee came to the door. When she opened it, she saw that Mack and Brenda were naked from the waist down. When Brenda told Jaycee that Mack had been raping her, she promised that she would "handle it" and everything would be fine.

Everything was not fine, and Jaycee apparently knew it. She confided in her sister-in-law Donna that she and Mack had gotten into an argument and that he had packed his bags and left to live with a friend in Alabama. Jaycee also said that she had found a pair of "wet" underwear in the laundry belonging to Brenda. Donna urged Jaycee to seek medical treatment for Brenda and to report the abuse. Jaycee told Donna the next day that she made the appointment.

But when Donna checked in with Jaycee later, Jaycee had changed her tune. She told Donna that she now doubted Brenda because of her "disability" (Brenda struggled to read and write) and told Donna that she planned to go to Alabama to help Mack find a place to open a donut shop. That seemed odd to Donna because of an earlier conversation with Mack, who had told her after he started receiving government benefits to support his adopted children, "Oh, since I got the kids, I don't need to work anymore." Jaycee never reported the abuse. For a long time, neither did Donna.

Around that same time, Jaycee called her brother (Donna's husband) telling him that Mack had a gun and was about to commit suicide. When he rushed to the house to talk Mack down, Mack admitted that "he had done something really bad and he would not go to jail for it."

He did not go to jail then. Nor did he kill himself. Instead, the Doaks quickly moved away from Jaycee's family to Butler, Alabama. In their new home, Jaycee's treatment of Brenda deteriorated. She began hitting her and calling her a "ho" and a "slut." Brenda was no more than 13 years old.

Within a year, the family moved again, this time to Florida. The abuse continued. Mack followed Brenda to the laundry room, pulled down her pants, and raped her. Brenda again asked Jaycee for help. This time Jaycee did not comfort Brenda; instead, she insisted that she was lying and that her "disability" was "playing tricks" on her.

Mack often used the Doaks’ bedroom for cover. It was off limits for the children (unless they were with Mack of course) and both Brenda and the girls’ brother Eddie noticed that Mack would call Laura or Leah to the bedroom and then play music loudly. Brenda recognized the tactic from her own experience and feared that Mack was also abusing her little sisters.

He was. Laura testified that Mack once called her to his room and locked the door behind her. He then touched her "private area" and, as Laura testified, put his penis "inside [her] private part." Mack also touched the younger girls while they were doing the dishes, and once woke Leah and penetrated her with his finger. All three of the girls told Jaycee about Mack's abuse. When they did, Jaycee had an argument with Mack—but the sexual abuse continued. And instead of helping the girls, Jaycee became "more strict," yelling at them and hitting them.

Two years after they arrived in Florida, it was time to move again, this time to Thomasville, Alabama. Mack's abuses continued. Leah, the youngest sister of the three, testified that he would touch her in the kitchen and call her to his bedroom where he would force her to have sex with him. And Laura recalled that one day, early in the morning, Mack picked her up and put her on the washer or the dryer in the laundry room. He took off her bra and began touching her breasts. This time her younger brother Eddie walked in. Eddie remembered seeing Mack with his pants down, one hand on Laura's thigh and another on her genitals. Mack told Eddie to go back to sleep. Eddie complied; he testified that he "would have been hurt if [he] didn't listen." Mack told him to forget what he'd seen, and he stayed quiet. His fears were well-founded; at least one time Mack gave Eddie a "hard slap" on the face, and Jaycee sometimes hit him with a wooden spoon.

Mack also abused Brenda in Thomasville. He woke her and ordered her to do laundry in his room, but instead he raped her. Brenda went to Jaycee again. But Jaycee again dismissed her, accusing her of lying and calling her names. She also hit her. When a teacher's aide at school noticed the bruises on Brenda's arms and asked her what had happened, Brenda revealed that Jaycee had hit her. The very next day the family left for Monroeville, Alabama; they had been in Thomasville for less than a year.

After the move, nothing changed. Mack raped Brenda in the house's storage room when she was putting away groceries, and again when she was doing laundry. He called Laura to his room and, as Laura said, his "private area went into mine." Mack continued to "force [Leah] to have sex with him." Laura again told Jaycee about the abuse. At first Jaycee assured Laura that she would be okay, but that attitude did not last; instead she hit Laura and otherwise treated her poorly.

The family also took two trips while they lived in Monroeville. On the first, to Cambodia, Mack and Jaycee brought Brenda, who was told that one purpose of the trip was to marry her to one of Mack's cousins. No marriage plans were set. But Mack caught her alone while she was getting...