State vs. Ricky Aaron

On October 28, 1999, the defendant, Ricky Grover Aaron, was indicted by the Davidson County Grand Jury for especially aggravated sexual exploitation of a minor and especially aggravated kidnapping. Following a jury trial in June of 2001, the defendant was convicted of especially aggravated sexual exploitation of a minor and false imprisonment. The trial court sentenced the defendant to eleven years for especially aggravated sexual exploitation of a minor and eleven months, twenty-nine days for false imprisonment. The sentences were to run concurrently to each other and consecutively to a federal sentence the defendant was serving at the time of trial. The defendant argues eight issues on appeal:(1) whether the trial court erred in denying the defendant's motion to dismiss due to unnecessary delay; (2) whether the trial court erred in denying the defendant's pretrial motion to suppress his alleged admissions to police because the defendant was subjected to custodial interrogation without having been given Miranda warnings; (3) whether the trial court erred in denying the defendant's motion to suppress a handgun seized by police from his vehicle; (4) whether the evidence in the record is sufficient to support a finding by a rational trier of fact that the defendant is guilty beyond a reasonable doubt of especially aggravated sexual exploitation of a minor and false imprisonment; (5) whether the trial court erred in admitting alleged hearsay testimony related to the alleged victim's mother's response to her daughter's characterization of the defendant as a "pervert"; (6) whether the trial court erred in admitting evidence that another person had been convicted of a sexual offense involving the alleged victim in an unrelated case; (7) whether the trial court erred in failing to declare a mistrial when the prosecutor, in direct violation of the trial court's pretrial ruling, elicited testimony from a police detective that the defendant admitted having child pornography on his computer; and (8) whether the trial court erred in imposing an excessive sentence for the defendant's conviction for especially aggravated sexual exploitation of a minor, and did the court further err in ordering that the sentences in this case be served consecutively to the defendant's federal sentence. We affirm the judgments of the trial court.