Kwentel Moultrie, whom a jury last August found guilty of rape, was sentenced to 10 years in prison today. He had previously turned down a deal that would have drastically reduced the charge and spared him prison.
Circuit Judge Terence Perkins relied on the jury verdict, the recommended sentencing guidelines of between 8 to 30 years, and today’s arguments by the attorneys from both sides to support his sentence. He said he did not hear evidence or convincing arguments that would support a “downward departure,” or a lesser sentence, than the recommended guideline. Still: 10 years is almost the bottom of the guidelines.
Perkins issued the sentence at the end of a three-hour hearing this morning at the Flagler County courthouse, adjourning just before noon.
The 10 years in prison are to be followed by 15 years on sex-offender probation. Moultrie will have credit for time served at the county jail, where he’s been for 335 days. He has also been designated a sexual predator. He will not be eligible for gain time, or early release, after serving 85 percent of his time.
In earlier stages of the case, the prosecution had offered to reduce the first-degree rape charge to a child abuse charge, and left him serving only probation, not prison. The offer was a reflection of the weakness of the state’s case: the victim in the case would not testify.
The deal was never put back on the table after Moultrie was charged with second-degree murder in a separate, unrelated incident in late 2021, when he was out on bond on the rape charge. The alleged rape took place in 2019.
He was involved in an armed robbery in Palm Coasts R Section where the resident–the drug dealer–shot and killed an alleged co-conspirator of Moultrie’s. Moultrie was charged with the murder, since the killing occurred as the result of a felony he was involved in.
The murder case is still in the pre-trial phase. (Moultrie refused to go to the courthouse at his last two pre-trials in that case, in September and in December.) The murder charge was not a factor in the judge’s sentencing, the judge said.
The prosecution described Moultrie as a chronically lying psychopath and argued for 20 years. The defense disputed the psychological report about her client, pointed out that Moultrie was never charged with burglary–to underscore the fact that he was invited into the home where the alleged rape took place, though an invitation into a home cannot be equated with consent for sex–and stressed that the case was based on hearsay, not direct evidence, and a series of contradictory evidence in the accounts of the girl’s friend, in depositions, and in the girl’s own interview with the Child Protection Team.
The judge reminded Moultrie’s defense attorney that he still had to “start with the findings that the elements of this crime have been proven.” The defense attorney did not disagree, but that the elements were proven on a second-hand witness.
“She didn’t say, ‘rape,’ ‘sex,’ nothing of that nature,” Assistant Public Defender Regina Nunnally said of the alleged victim, based on the words she used in her Child Protection Team interview. But her friend who testified to the jury used those words. “That’s a flat-out lie,” Nunnally said, “and that is a problem, a miscarriage of justice.” Nunnally said the words in the CPT interview “completely contradict” the verdict. Nunnally also explicitly said of the sex: “There’s no indication this was against her will.”
“Now the question is,” Nunnally said, “30 years, 15 years, is that warranted for something that might have lasted 30 seconds? One minute? 20 seconds? Five? I understand that it’s no means no, but when she said stop, he stopped. And when when he stopped, then they got kicked out, and then here we are.” Nunnally also noted the prior offer as an indication that despite allthe evidence the state had, it was willing to keep him out of prison. “The facts never changed. It’s the verdict that made the difference,” Nunnally said.
She asked the judge to factor in those elements to mitigate the sentence.
Assistant State Attorney Melissa Clark relied on the victim’s same statements in the CPT interview to show that the girl had told Moultrie she would see him again, but the next day, not that night. Then Clark’s voice rose when she said that unwanted sex is “sex battery” whether it lasts a few seconds or more.
“Last I checked when someone doesn’t want to have sex with you, that is a sexual battery, whether it’s two seconds, 10 seconds, 10 minutes or hours. That is a sexual battery. That’s what he’s been convicted of,” Clark said with seething emphasis. Noting his history of juvenile delinquency and adult criminal offenses, she added, “He is a danger to the community. He has demonstrated in this case he is an opportunistic predator.”
Moultrie, a former resident of Brittany lane in Palm Coast, is 24. The alleged rape took place when Moultrie was 20 and the girl was 16.
Moultrie’s first jury trial ended in a mistrial on April 20, 2022. A jury at a subsequent trial found Moultrie guilty on Aug. 26. The victim testified at neither trial, leaving Assistant State Attorney Melissa Clark, who prosecuted the case, to rely on a friend of the victim’s as her chief witness.
The friend testified at both trials. She conceded that both she and the victim were drunk to the point of throwing up that night, when both were spending the night at the friend’s sister’s house. The two girls had partied alone, then gone out to Steak and Shake in Palm Coast, inviting friends to join them. Moultrie joined them there, having known one of them previously–but not the victim.
The girls invited everyone back to the house for a time, before asking them all to leave. But the victim asked Moultrie to return later. Moultrie was with a friend of his. Both did return, and the victim let them in. The alleged victim’s friend testified that she then woke up to see a shape move over her friend, and that later, after Moultrie and his friend were let out of the house, the alleged victim told her friend she’d been raped.
The question at trial was not whether Moultrie had illicit sex with a minor: the age difference being as narrow as it was made that point moot. The question was whether the sex was consensual or not. Nunnally argued to the jury that it was consensual, with every indication pointing at the alleged victim initiating contact with Moultrie, inviting (or sneaking) him into the house, inviting him into her bed, and only later claiming he had raped her.
Moultrie himself testified, denying he’d raped the girl, but doing so after the prosecution had shown repeated instances of Moultrie lying–to law enforcement and to the girl’s friend especially, and repeatedly. He had lied about having sex with the girl, even though his DNA was found in her after a sex assault exam was conducted. Moultrie’s own demeanor–cold, unemotional, detached–did not help his case. But the alleged victim’s absence did not help the prosecution’s case, either, which may explain the first trial ending in a hung jury.
There were indications that the jury in the second trial may have misapplied the law, its guilty verdict swayed by the inaccurate belief that Moultrie had had illicit sex with a minor. That possibility became more than aparent during deliberations, when the jury asked the court a question: “Is it state law that a 16 year old having sex with a 20 year old man is statutory rape by a 20-year-old man,” and “Can a 16 year old give consent to sexual intercourse with a man 18 years of age or older”?
Neither question was relevant to the trial. Neither question had been touched on by the evidence presented by the prosecution. Perkins, the judge, told the jury to continue deliberating, and to rely on evidence presented. So the questions were not answered directly, leaving it to the jury to deduce that they were not relevant. Whether it did so cannot be known. But the questions suggest that the jury’s mis-perceptions may have played a role in its verdict.
Nunnally at trial and since has attempted by various means first to show that the state’s case had relied on circumstantial evidence, since the victim never testified. Nunnally then attempted to suggest that all evidence favorable to her client had not been produced, an allusion to the possibility–never proven–that the state did not do “due diligence” (in Nunnally’s words) to find the victim and compel her to testify. The judge did not give much validity to that approach, saying the state could choose its own witnesses.
At his sentencing today Moultrie’s mother told the court that Moultrie had been shaken by the murder of his own father years ago, when Moultrie was 7, soon after the family moved to Palm Coast. She said he has two daughters, 2 and 5. I just want you judge to just have some type of leniency for my son. he’s not a bad kid. He’s 24 years old, we all make mistakes,” she told the judge. “If anything happens with him getting sentenced, I just want him closer to me, closer to home.” But that’s not in the court’s power to decide: past the sentencing, Moultrie will be in the custody of the state’s prison system, which is notoriously indifferent to family’s whereabouts when it decides where in its archipelago of prisons it decides to incarcerate men and women.
More revealingly, Moultrie’s mother, who has three other sons and a daughter, spoke as if Moultrie had owned up to have committed the crime. “He knows what he has done, he’s feeling real bad about it,” she said.
Moultrie’s girlfriend of nearly six years, and their 2-year-old daughter’s father, also testified. She said his daughter, who will be 3 in May, “asks for him a lot.” Weeping, she described Moultrie as “always there for her,” referring to the daughter. “I’ve got a 2-year-old who wants er daddy and he’s not there,” she said, describing having to go to therapy and witnessing emerging behavioral issues with her daughter.
“He’ll give you the shirt on his back if he could, he’s like a teddy bear,” she said of Moultrie. “And it kind of bothers me that some of the evidence was not able to be presented.” When Nunnally asked her what she thought a “fair sentence” would be, she replied: “I just want him to come home to my daughter.” Several other family members, many of them having driven in from South Carolina, also spoke on Moultrie’s behalf, the word “teddy bear” recurring.
Moultrie still faces the second-degree murder charge and yet another, separate felonty charge of battery of an inmate. “I didn’t consider those at all for our purposes here today,” Perkins said. But due to those cases, he issued an order that would keep Moultrie at the county jail. The judge allowed Moultrie’s mother to hug her son briefly.
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