The New Hampshire Supreme Court rejected Thursday the appeal of a Warner man convicted of raping a child at gunpoint decades ago.
Ricky Flanders, 52, argued that he did not receive a fair trial in Merrimack County Superior Court in Concord in February 2017. But the three justices who presided over oral arguments in the case May 7 disagreed, upholding the lower court’s decisions on the admissibility of certain evidence and, in turn, the jury’s verdict convicting Flanders.
Flanders, who is serving a minimum of 20 years in state prison, has maintained his innocence despite his felony convictions. On his behalf, appellate defender Stephanie Hausman argued that the victim in the case had an ulterior motive to fabricate a story of sexual assault and that the circumstances were withheld from jurors. She said the victim only disclosed to police in June 2016 after his cousins – whom he’d told about the sexual abuse from his childhood – were arrested for physically assaulting Flanders.
“He finally decided to go to police, not because he was no longer afraid of Mr. Flanders, but because, suddenly, his cousins had acted on his words and were facing serious consequences,” Hausman said, adding that the man then felt he had to “legitimize his lies.”
On review, the justices said the value of that evidence is limited and that admitting it could have been unfairly prejudicial to the state. For example, it could have distracted from the case at hand or mislead the jury.
Senior Assistant Attorney General Stephen Fuller spoke specifically to that issue during oral arguments, saying that Judge Richard McNamara was concerned allowing one of the victim’s cousins to testify could cause “a trial within a trial.”
On appeal, Flanders also questioned why McNamara allowed evidence of drug use preceding a sexual assault to be admitted. The victim testified at trial that Flanders asked him to hold a pistol so he could then use drugs intravenously. Flanders then put the gun to the victim’s face and forced him to engage in sexual acts, according to court testimony.
“As this testimony shows, the injection was closely connected in time to the charged assault, and it completed the story. It explained why the defendant handed the gun to the victim and then took it back,” the high court ruled. “In addition, as the trial court noted, the jury could have reasonably inferred that the defendant sought to attain ‘an altered mental state’ before committing the assault.”
Further, the justices said that any “reasonable juror” could find that sexually assaulting a child at gunpoint is far “more emotionally charged” than the act of shooting up drugs.
The court also backed McNamara’s decision to withhold certain confidential records. The justices said the restricted portions of the documents contained no information essential to Flanders’s defense.
(Alyssa Dandrea can be reached at 369-3319 or at adandrea@cmonitor.com.)