United States v. Ingram

UNITED STATES OF AMERICA, Plaintiff-Appellee, v. ANTHONY L. INGRAM, Defendant-Appellant.

No. 20-3267

UNITED STATES COURT OF APPEALS FOR THE SIXTH CIRCUIT

March 12, 2021

NOT RECOMMENDED FOR PUBLICATION

File Name: 21a0130n.06

ON APPEAL FROM THE UNITED STATES DISTRICT COURT FOR THE NORTHERN DISTRICT OF OHIO

BEFORE: WHITE, LARSEN, and NALBANDIAN, Circuit Judges.

HELENE N. WHITE, Circuit Judge. Defendant Anthony Ingram appeals his kidnapping conviction, arguing that the district court erred in admitting other-acts evidence under Federal Rule of Evidence 404(b), the jury instructions were erroneous, and the evidence was insufficient to support his conviction. We AFFIRM.

I.

A grand jury indictment charged Ingram with kidnapping in violation of 18 U.S.C. § 1201(a)(1).¹ The indictment alleged that Ingram kidnapped the victim, H.K., for the purpose of sexually assaulting her. Before trial, the government filed a motion in limine and a notice of intent to use Rule 404(b) evidence, seeking to introduce evidence that Ingram's phone was used to conduct numerous internet searches related to pornography involving rape, kidnapping, or forcible sexual conduct. The government argued that the evidence is admissible to show Ingram's intentand his state of mind, or that it constituted background, or res gestae, evidence. At the final pretrial hearing, the government clarified that it did not intend to introduce any pornographic images or videos from the websites Ingram visited, but sought only to admit the search terms Ingram used and the titles and URLs of the websites he visited. The district court rejected the government's res gestae argument but explained that it would likely admit the evidence as relevant to establishing Ingram's specific intent, so long as some of the more prejudicial and irrelevant terms, such as "teen," were redacted. The district court directed the parties to review the search terms and stated that it would revisit the issue later. Before trial, the district court ordered the government to redact other terms, including "roofies" and "chloroform." With those redactions, the evidence, consisting of a list of 118 internet searches and up to 160 website visits over the five weeks preceding the alleged rape, was admitted at trial over Ingram's objection.

The following additional evidence was presented at trial. The victim, H.K., testified that she met Austin Redmon—a long-haul truck driver who worked for the same company as Ingram—on an online dating website. Redmon sent H.K. $200, and H.K. used that money to travel by car from Colorado to a truck stop in Indiana, where Redmon picked her up in his truck. Redmon and H.K. spent several days together in Redmon's truck delivering and picking up various loads, traveling to Michigan, Georgia, Maryland, and then back to Michigan. Redmon and H.K. had a consensual sexual relationship during the trip. While in Georgia, however, Redmon and H.K. had an altercation because Redmon had been drinking and wanted to engage in sexual acts with which H.K. was not comfortable. Around that time, H.K. decided she wanted to go home. Redmon told H.K. that he could not take her to her car in Indiana, but Ingram would meet them with his truck in Michigan and drive her to her car in Indiana, which Redmon told H.K. was on Ingram's route.

GPS records and Ingram's internet search history show that while Ingram was en route to Michigan to pick up H.K., his phone was used to search whether it is "against the law to abandon someone in the middle of the road trip," and whether "[i]f someone is riding with you if you leave them at a gas station against their will and drive off is that against the law." Ex. 308; Ex. 309.

H.K. testified that when Ingram arrived at the designated truck stop in Michigan, around 6:50 pm on August 10, 2018, Redmon exited his truck and went to Ingram's truck to talk to Ingram without H.K. A few minutes later, Redmon called H.K. on her cell phone and told her to bring her belongings to Ingram's truck. H.K. did not know Ingram and did not speak to him until she entered his truck.

Before entering Ingram's truck, H.K. discovered that Redmon had deleted his contact information from her phone, and she later realized that he had also blocked her on social-media sites. Soon after Ingram and H.K. departed the truck stop in Michigan, H.K. realized that Ingram was not driving in the direction of her car in Indiana. When she asked him why, Ingram explained that he needed to go to Maryland first and would take H.K. back to her car within a week. Although H.K. told Ingram that she needed to get back to her car right away, Ingram declined, saying "Sorry." R. 54, PID 611. H.K. called her sister and a friend and spoke to them about finding another way home, to no avail. H.K. was scared and planned to get out of the truck at the next stop.

Around 10:00 pm, near Hudson, Ohio, Ingram pulled the truck over on the side of the interstate and got out to urinate. When he reentered the truck, Ingram told H.K. that he had "bought" her from Redmon for $500, "so we are going to do what I say." Id. at PID 616. After a struggle, Ingram took H.K.'s phone and raped her, slapping her on the left cheek and threatening her with what appeared to be a gun.

About an hour later, Ingram pulled his truck into a Pilot truck stop in Austintown, Ohio. H.K. testified that Ingram had told her to stay near him, but H.K. got out of the truck while Ingram was pumping gas, gave him a hug, and went into the Pilot without any of her belongings. After using the Pilot restroom, H.K. asked a female employee at the McDonald's connected to the Pilot if she could use a phone to call 911. The McDonald's employees hid H.K. behind the counter, where she would be out of sight if Ingram came in looking for her. H.K. told the 911 dispatcher that she had been "sold in sex trafficking" and asked for help. Id. at PID 638.

The police arrived minutes later. H.K. then went through multiple interviews with officers, consented to a sexual-assault evaluation, and stayed in a nearby safe house. Ingram's sperm DNA was found on H.K.'s inner thigh, vaginal swab, and underwear, and Ingram's non-sperm DNA was found on H.K.'s left cheek, consistent with H.K.'s account of an open-handed slap. There was no evidence of acute trauma in H.K.'s genitals; however, the nurse who examined H.K. testified that an oft-cited study found that approximately ninety-five percent of sexual-assault victims do not have genitalia injury.

Surveillance video showed Ingram walking into the Pilot around the time the police arrived, staying inside for two-and-a-half minutes, and then exiting the Pilot and driving away. Phone records showed that Redmon and Ingram called each other several times that night and the next morning, and GPS records showed that Ingram made a brief stop on the side of the road shortly before midnight. Several months later, law enforcement found H.K.'s phone and other personal belongings where the GPS records indicated Ingram had stopped.

Ingram was arrested the morning after the Pilot stop. Officers located a BB gun that looked like a real firearm in an outside compartment of Ingram's truck. Officers also tracked Redmon's truck to a parking lot in Columbus, Ohio, where they found the truck abandoned.

The government introduced audio of Ingram's August 11 interview with officers. The government highlighted several of Ingram's statements that were inconsistent with other evidence introduced at trial, including Ingram's statements that H.K. likely still had her cell phone with her; that he waited almost forty minutes for H.K. to come out of the Pilot before he left; and that he had placed H.K.'s belongings near one of the fuel pumps. Ingram also did not initially volunteer that he and H.K. engaged in sexual activity, but later said it was consensual.

The jury found Ingram guilty of kidnapping, and the district court imposed a bottom-of-the-Guidelines sentence of 360 months' imprisonment.

II.

Ingram raises three challenges to his conviction: (1) that the district court improperly admitted evidence that he had searched for and visited websites with pornography involving rape, kidnapping, or forcible sexual conduct; (2) that the jury instructions were erroneous; and (3) that the evidence was insufficient. We address each challenge in turn.

A.

We review most evidentiary challenges for abuse of discretion, but we have been inconsistent in our review of rulings made under Federal Rule of Evidence 404(b). United States v. LaVictor, 848 F.3d 428, 444 (6th Cir. 2017).

Sometimes, this Court will: (1) review for clear error the district court's determination that prior bad acts took place; (2) apply de novo review to a district court's determination that the evidence was offered for a permissible purpose; (3) and review for abuse of discretion the determination that the probative value of 404(b) evidence is not substantially outweighed by unfair prejudice. Other times, this Court has applied a single-tier abuse of discretion standard.

Id. at 444-45 (citations omitted). We need not wade into this debate, as Ingram's challenge fails under either standard of review. We will therefore apply the three-tiered standard as it is arguably more favorable to Ingram.

Rule 404(b), entitled "Other Crimes, Wrongs, or Acts," provides in part that "[e]vidence of any other crime, wrong, or act is not admissible to prove a person's character in order to show that on a particular occasion the person acted in accordance with the character," but the "evidence may be admissible for another purpose, such as proving motive, opportunity, intent, preparation, plan, knowledge, identity, absence of mistake, or lack of accident." Fed. R. Evid. 404(b)(1)-(2). At issue in this case is the search history and website visits made from Ingram's phone showing repeated searches for rape-related pornography in the five weeks preceding Ingram's encounter with H.K. There is no dispute as to the first step in...