Appeals court upholds ruling in sex abuse civil case

A former Jefferson City woman is not entitled to sue her former stepfather for damages after he reportedly raped and sodomized her when she was a girl, a three-judge appeals court panel in Kansas City ruled this week.

The nine-page opinion upheld Cole County Circuit Judge Dan Green's May 5, 2014, ruling the woman filed her case too late and didn't make a case she should receive the damages she wanted.

The woman, now 31 and living in another state, is identified in the appeals court's opinion only as S.H.

She was S.S. and 10 years old when her mother married James R. Cannon - then 22 - in 1995.

In her 2011 lawsuit, seeking damages for childhood sexual abuse as allowed by state law, S.H. argued Cannon began grooming her for sex in 1996, when she was 11, and he began raping and sodomizing her when she was 12 through 13.

Her lawsuit reported Cannon was arrested in 1999 on statutory rape and sodomy charges, and he was sentenced to seven years in prison after pleading guilty to those charges.

She had argued to the appeals court Green "erroneously applied the law in denying her claim because Cannon's guilty plea to statutory rape and statutory sodomy conclusively established that he caused her harm and that she was entitled to damages."

In his six-page ruling last year, Green noted S.H. was 18 in 2003 and 21 in 2006 but didn't file her lawsuit until 2011 - too late, he said, under the provisions of state law at the time.

Green noted, at the times Cannon was arrested and later sentenced to prison, Missouri law said the statute of limitations for a case like S.H.'s was within "five years after the date the plaintiff attains the age of eighteen or within three years of the date the plaintiff discovers or reasonably should have discovered that the injury or illness was caused by child sexual abuse, whichever later occurs."

A 2004 amendment to that law extended the statute of limitations to within 10 years of a plaintiff turning 21 but, Green ruled, the earlier version of the law was in effect for S.H.'s case - so she should have filed it by 2008, not in 2011.

The appeals court's ruling, written by Judge Lisa White Hardwick, noted in a judge-tried case, the appeals court "will affirm the circuit court's judgment unless there is no substantial evidence to support it, it is against the weight of the evidence, or it erroneously declares or applies the law."

And where there is a dispute about facts, Hardwick wrote, citing a 2010 state Supreme Court opinion: "We defer to the circuit court's resolution of contested factual issues 'because it is in a better position not only to judge the credibility of the witnesses and the persons directly but also their sincerity and character and other trial intangibles which may not be completely revealed by the (trial) record.'"

In his answers to S.H.'s lawsuit, Cannon admitted being sentenced to prison on the statutory rape and sodomy charges, but the appeals court noted, "he denied S.H.'s allegations that he was 'caught repeatedly raping and sodomizing' her. In closing argument, Cannon did not concede his guilty plea was an admission to acts that would have constituted a violation of the statutes" S.H. used as the basis for her lawsuit.

She also had pointed to a finding in an April 14, 2009, Missouri Supreme Court ruling involving Cannon and her mother's divorce, where the high court ruled Cannon could not have unsupervised visitation with the two children born during their marriage, partly because of his sex abuse convictions.

In that case, the high court's 17-page ruling, written by then-Chief Justice Laura Denvir Stith, began with a statement "Cannon was convicted of first-degree statutory rape and first-degree statutory sodomy of his then 12-year-old stepdaughter."

While finding S.H. didn't prove her case, Green ruled she couldn't use the Supreme Court's finding because she had not shown that information independently from the high court case.

In affirming Green's ruling, the appeals court wrote: "The circuit court was not required to accept S.H.'s evidence as to her injuries and resulting damages, and the judgment clearly indicates that the court did not accept it.

"We are bound to defer to the circuit court's decision."