Date: 01-18-2018

Case Style:

Case Number: 16-4732

Judge: Wilkinson

Court: United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit on appeal from the Eastern District of Virginia (Fairfax County)

Plaintiff's Attorney: Michael John Frank

Defendant's Attorney: Mark Bodner

Description: Michael Maynes raises various assignments of error arising from his trial and
convictions for four counts of sex trafficking by use of force, fraud, or coercion in
violation of 18 U.S.C. § 1591(a) and one count of conspiracy to commit sex trafficking in
violation of 18 U.S.C. §§ 1591(a) and 1594(c). For the reasons that follow, we affirm the
convictions.
I.
Michael Maynes was a pimp. He worked with several others in running his
prostitution business, including his girlfriend and two male relatives. His sex trafficking
convictions relate to four women whom he prostituted.
The first woman gave her child to Maynes’s girlfriend to care for while she
engaged in commercial sex work, and has not seen her child since. When she asked to see
her son, she was told that Maynes would decide when she could take time off from
prostitution to see her child. She later received a text threatening that her son would be
taken to Child Protective Services if she did not send more money to Maynes’s girlfriend.
The second woman initially met Maynes in Houston, where he told her that he
worked in construction and expressed romantic interest in her. Maynes suggested moving
together to Virginia to be closer to his family, and she agreed. Once there, she was
surprised to learn that Maynes wanted to prostitute her. He then refused to let her return
home from the motel where she worked, and thus refused to allow her to see her infant
daughter, unless she met her $1,500 daily earnings quota. While she opened a savings
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account to hide some of her earnings from Maynes, he later learned of the account and
required her to give him nearly all of the funds.
The third woman was convinced by Maynes to perform commercial sex work
when he told her that she would receive a home as well as 50 percent of her prostitution
proceeds. She believed this income and a stable home would help her regain custody of
her children. Maynes did not provide her with a home, and did not allow her to keep 50
percent of the prostitution proceeds. He did, however, provide her with cocaine, which
she was addicted to.
The fourth woman was performing commercial sex work in Orlando, Florida,
when Maynes contacted her through an internet site advertising her services. Maynes
invited her to come to Virginia to work as an escort, and promised to help her obtain a
home and a car and provide her a share of the prostitution earnings. Maynes did not
follow through on these promises after she arrived in Virginia and began working for
him.
In November 2015, Maynes was indicted for conspiracy to commit sex trafficking
in violation of 18 U.S.C. §§ 1591(a) and 1594(c), five counts of sex trafficking by force,
fraud, or coercion in violation of 18 U.S.C. § 1591(a), and one count of kidnapping /
aiding and abetting kidnapping in violation of 18 U.S.C. §§ 1201(a)(1), (d), and (2). After
a trial, the district court acquitted Maynes as to one count of sex trafficking, and the jury
returned a not guilty verdict on the kidnapping charge. The jury convicted Maynes of
conspiracy to commit sex trafficking and four counts of sex trafficking. Maynes was
sentenced to concurrent sentences of 420 months on each count, a special assessment of
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$100 on each count, and 5 years of supervised release. The district court also imposed an
order of restitution for the victims in the amount of $405,400.
Maynes appeals all of his convictions. He asserts that the district court erred in its
jury instructions and erred in entering a judgment of conviction, because there was
insufficient evidence. He also asserts that he should receive a new trial because the
district court abused its discretion in excluding certain evidence.1 As explained below, we
are not persuaded by any of these arguments, and we affirm his convictions.
II.
Maynes first contends that the district court’s instruction defining force, fraud, and
coercion was insufficient because the district court did not include Maynes’s proffered
materiality instruction.
The federal sex trafficking statute on which Maynes’s convictions rest is violated
by anyone who “knowingly . . . recruits, entices, harbors, transports, provides, obtains,
advertises, maintains, patronizes, or solicits by any means a person” knowing “that means
of force, threats of force, fraud, coercion described in subsection (e)(2), or any
combination of such means will be used to cause the person to engage in a commercial
sex act.” 18 U.S.C. § 1591(a). To clarify the meaning of “fraud” in the statute, Maynes
sought an instruction informing the jury that fraud is an “act of trickery or deceit
1 Maynes also challenges his trial counsel for ineffective assistance. We do not
generally review such claims on direct appeal, see United States v. King, 119 F.3d 290,
295 (4th Cir. 1997), and in any event we see nothing in this record to indicate that
counsel’s performance fell outside “the wide range of reasonable professional
assistance.” Strickland v. Washington, 466 U.S. 668, 689 (1984).
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especially when involving misrepresentation; such specific act of fraud must have been
material to cause a person to engage in a commercial sex act.” J.A. 50. The district court
rejected this proposed instruction, and instead instructed the jury that fraud is “any act of
deception or misrepresentation.” J.A. 718–19. Maynes argues that this instruction
erroneously allowed the jury to convict him based on even immaterial misrepresentations.
He asserts that this is an impermissible broadening of the statute, because the term
“fraud” implies an element of materiality.
We agree with Maynes that only material misrepresentations could contribute to a
violation of the statute by means of fraud. Indeed, the Government does not dispute this
point, and the Supreme Court has acknowledged that “fraud” has long “had a well-settled
meaning at common law,” and that this meaning “require[s] a misrepresentation or
concealment of material fact.” Neder v. United States, 527 U.S. 1, 22 (1999).
Nonetheless, we remain unconvinced of both the purported deficiencies of the instruction
given and the supposed superiority of Maynes’s proffered instruction. The district court’s
instructions tracked the language of the statute and adequately conveyed the required
elements. By contrast, Maynes’s instruction is, at best, a misleading statement of the law.
The definition of fraud given to the jury cannot be evaluated in isolation, and must
be considered in the context of the surrounding instructions. Shortly before defining
fraud, the district court informed the jury that an element of 18 U.S.C. § 1591(a) was
“that the defendant [acted] knowing or in reckless disregard of the fact that means of
force, threats of force, fraud, coercion, or any combination of such means would be used
to cause that person to engage in a commercial sex act.” J.A. 718. Thus, for any fraud to
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be relevant to the question of guilt, it must have been fraud that “would be used to cause
that person to engage in a commercial sex act.” Using the district court’s definition of
fraud, the complete element thus was that “any act of deception or misrepresentation”
would be “used to cause that person to engage in a commercial sex act.” By definition,
only material misrepresentations could be used to cause a person to engage in such acts.
The concept of materiality was therefore contained in the instructions given to the jury.
Any additional meaning that Maynes’s proffered instruction would have conveyed
would likely have been a misrepresentation of the law. First, his instruction might have
led a jury to believe that the fraud must in fact have caused a commercial sex act. But
there is no such requirement in the statute; the crime is complete when the defendant
recruits, entices, harbors, etc., the victim with knowledge that the prohibited means will
be used in the future to cause them to engage in commercial sex acts. See, e.g., United
States v. Willoughby, 742 F.3d 229, 241 (6th Cir. 2014); United States v. Garcia–
Gonzalez, 714 F.3d 306, 312 (5th Cir. 2013); United States v. Brooks, 610 F.3d 1186,
1197 n.4 (9th Cir. 2010). There is no requirement that a commercial sex act actually
occurred, much less that fraud in fact caused the commercial sex act. To the extent
Maynes’s proffered instruction implied otherwise, it was incorrect. Further, by including
causation in the definition of fraud, Maynes’s instruction obscures the statute’s clear
statement that any one of the prohibited means is sufficient for conviction, alone or in any
combination. See 18 U.S.C. 1591(a).
In the end, Maynes is simply wrong in claiming that the district court’s instruction
permitted conviction for ordinary prostitution. And in any event, Maynes did not simply
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facilitate prostitution for women who freely chose that profession. Instead, the evidence
showed that he convinced women to work for him through a variety of material
misrepresentations, such as false promises to provide the women with homes and
incomes. And once the women were working for him, he used a variety of coercive
means, such as controlling access to their children, to prevent them from leaving.
Maynes’s challenge to the sufficiency of the evidence therefore must also fail. We
“may set aside the jury’s verdict on the ground of insufficient evidence only if no rational
trier of fact could have agreed with the jury.” Coleman v. Johnson, 132 S. Ct. 2060, 2062
(2012) (per curiam). Here, evidence was provided to support each element of each of
Maynes’s convictions. Although Maynes denied at trial that he made promises to the
women, that he withheld children from their mothers, and that he provided the women
with drugs, the jury was entitled to disbelieve his testimony in light of the other evidence.
We are not empowered to reweigh that evidence or to second guess the jury’s credibility
determinations.
III.
Maynes next challenges his convictions on the basis of the district court’s decision
to exclude certain evidence relating to the women’s sexual histories. Specifically, the
district court limited the extent to which Maynes’s attorney could cross-examine the
women regarding their sexual histories prior to engaging in commercial sex work for
Maynes. Maynes asserts that this evidence was necessary to his defense, because it would
have shown that the women were not innocent victims but rather “were aware of the
nature and circumstances attendant to the business of prostitution.” Maynes Opening Br.
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23. He thus contends that the district court’s ruling violated his rights under the
Confrontation Clause of the Sixth Amendment. We are unpersuaded.
District courts are given significant discretion in making evidentiary rulings, and
we will reverse such decisions only upon finding an abuse of that discretion. United
States v. Dinkins, 691 F.3d 358, 382 (4th Cir. 2012). In considering Sixth Amendment
challenges, specifically, “the Confrontation Clause guarantees an opportunity for
effective cross-examination, not cross-examination that is effective in whatever way, and
to whatever extent, the defense might wish.” Delaware v. Van Arsdall, 475 U.S. 673, 679
(1986) (quoting Delaware v. Fensterer, 474 U.S. 15, 20 (1985) (per curiam)). Therefore,
“trial judges retain wide latitude . . . to impose reasonable limits on [] cross-examination
based on concerns about, among other things, harassment, prejudice, confusion of the
issues, the witness’ safety, or interrogation that is repetitive or only marginally relevant.”
Van Arsdall, 475 U.S. at 679. There is no reason that this wide latitude should be
removed in the context of questions regarding witnesses’ sexual histories. The district
court remains in the best position to strike a balance between the relevance of the
information to the defense and the risk of creating a mini-trial into the victims’ character.
In this case, the possibility of subjecting the victims to a mini-trial was certainly
real. Disputes regarding whether their prior commercial sex work was consensual, how
extensive that prior experience was, how their prior experiences compared to their
experiences with Maynes, and similar questions could provide fodder for days of
tangential testimony. Indeed, allowing such testimony ran the risk that the focus of the
trial would shift from Maynes’s activity to the victims’ past lives. Simply knowing that
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some of the women had engaged in prior commercial sex work, without greater detail,
would have risked prejudicing the jury without actually illuminating the women’s
susceptibility to Maynes’s techniques.
The past sexual history of the victims was thus a poor guide to any assessment of
overtures made to victims whose vulnerability to the false blandishments of the defendant
was apparent. The testimony was at best of only the most marginal relevance to the core
issue in Maynes’s trial: not what the victims’ sexual history may have been, but whether
the defendant in this case employed force, threats of force, fraud, coercion, or any
combination of these to cause the women to commit commercial sex acts. For this reason,
many courts have found the victims’ sexual histories inadmissible in sex trafficking trials.
See, e.g., United States v. Gemma, 818 F.3d 23, 34 (1st Cir. 2016) (noting that evidence
of a victim’s prior prostitution in a § 1591(a) case is “either entirely irrelevant or of []
slight probative value in comparison to its prejudicial effect”); United States v. Rivera,
799 F.3d 180, 185 (2d Cir. 2015) (rejecting the argument that “a victim’s experience in
the sex industry, and knowledge of its practices, is . . . relevant to whether she was
coerced or whether, on the other hand, she knew precisely what she was getting into and
accepted it”) (quotation marks and emphasis omitted); United States v. Roy, 781 F.3d
416, 420–21 (8th Cir. 2015) (“The victim’s participation in prostitution either before or
after the time period in the indictment has no relevance to whether [the defendant] beat
her, threatened her, and took the money she made from prostitution in order to cause her
to engage in commercial sex.”); United States v. Cephus, 684 F.3d 703, 708 (7th Cir.
2012) (rejecting the defendant’s argument that “having already been a prostitute [the
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victim] would not have been deceived” by the defendant and finding that “the testimony
sought to be elicited . . . would have been irrelevant”).
Maynes in fact is complaining of a district court ruling that was more permissive
of the testimony he sought to elicit than many courts have been in similar cases. Rather
than a blanket exclusion, the district court here carefully weighed the probative value of
each specific piece of evidence against the concerns noted in Van Arsdall, ultimately
excluding only those lines of questioning most likely to lead to fruitless fishing
expeditions. For example, one woman testified that she moved from Houston to Virginia
with Maynes without realizing he intended to prostitute her, and was unsure what to do
when her first client arrived. The district court held that the defense could cross-examine
that woman as to her experience as a prostitute in Houston in order to challenge these
claims. See J.A. 458–60. This differentiation between types of sexual history evidence
reflects the district court’s careful consideration of the relevant factors. The ultimate
balance the district court struck was entirely fair; Maynes has not come close to
establishing any abuse of discretion on the part of the trial court.

Outcome: Based on the foregoing, the judgment of the district court is
AFFIRMED.

Plaintiff's Experts:

Defendant's Experts:

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