By Jim Phillips, The Athens News
An appellate court has apparently closed the last door on hopes by a convicted rapist that his conviction will be overturned.
Charles Nguyen
Charles Nguyen, 35, already has seen his request for judicial review turned down by the Ohio Supreme Court. On Dec. 12, the 4th District Court of Appeals, which in July rejected most of Nguyen’s appeal, filed a ruling in which it turned down his request to reopen that appeal.
In 2010, a jury in Athens County Common Pleas Court convicted Nguyen of rape, kidnapping, aggravated burglary, and evidence tampering, and a judge sentenced him to 30 years in prison.
Nguyen had been completing a medical residency in New York when he met an Athens woman through an online singles site, and then met her in person. According to trial testimony, after the woman told Nguyen she did not want a sexual relationship with him, he showed up at her Athens home unannounced, tied her up and raped her.
In July the 4th District Court turned down most of Nguyen’s appeal, rejecting a number of arguments supporting his claim that his conviction should be thrown out.
Nguyen had argued that his trial attorney erred by failing to ask for a “rape shield” hearing soon enough, to determine how deeply the defense could delve at trial into sexual contact between Nguyen and the woman that took place before the rape.
Noting that the trial judge did allow a rape shield hearing during the trial, the appellate court said it couldn’t see how the defense’s failure to ask for it earlier prejudiced Nguyen’s trial outcome.
Regarding an admitted sexual encounter Nguyen and the woman had two months before the rape, which involved manual stimulation, the appeals court agreed that this was in a different category from a violent rape, and that the “inflammatory or prejudicial nature” of testimony about the incident outweighed its “very slight” value as evidence.
Though Nguyen complained that his trial attorney was tightly restricted in what he could ask the woman on the stand about her past sex life, the appellate court called this a vague argument, and suggested that what Nguyen wanted to do was “go on a fishing expedition into the victim’s sexual past.”
Read the full story by Jim Phillips of the Athens News.
