A Pima County man was properly convicted and sentenced to prison for a 2019 voyeurism incident, the Arizona Court of Appeals announced Tuesday.
Aaron James Wells is serving a 3.75-year prison term after being found guilty by a jury of attempted voyeurism following a report by the mother of a 17-year-old girl that she saw him standing on a stepladder outside her daughter’s bathroom window in February 2019. At the time Wells lived across the street from the girl.
Wells, now 24, argued on appeal that Judge Pro Tempore Howard Fell abused his judicial discretion by refusing to instruct the jury that they could find Wells guilty of first-degree trespass instead. He also claimed there was insufficient evidence of sexual motivation to support a voyeurism conviction, an argument the court of appeal unanimously rejected.
“The evidence here was sufficient to allow the jury to reasonably infer Wells’ sexual motivation,” the appellate decision says. “The state presented evidence that Wells entered the victim’s property in the dark of night, with a ladder tall enough for him to reach and peer through (the girl’s) bathroom window. And, given that sexual stimulation is the typical, if not exclusive, reason for wanting to do such a thing, it was reasonable for a jury to find that Wells had a sexual motivation.”
Court records show Wells was serving probation for a 2018 resisting arrest charge when he came under suspicion for the voyeurism incident. Not only did the girl’s mother make the identification, but officers found a unique shoe print outside the girl’s bedroom and bathroom windows which matched to a pair of Wells’ shoes.
In addition, a stepladder like the one the girl’s mother saw near the window was missing from the house Wells lived at.
Prior to trial, Wells’ defense attorney asked the judge to instruct the jury on criminal trespass in the first degree. The facts of the case also fit with a trespass charge, but the Pima County Attorney’s Office pursued only a voyeurism and an attempted voyeurism charge, which is within the prosecutor’s purview.
The appellate court’s 3-0 decision notes a defendant “is not entitled to an instruction on an uncharged offense that does not qualify as a lesser-included offense, even if he might have been charged and convicted of the offense.”
A jury would later acquit Wells on the voyeurism charge and find him guilty of the attempted voyeurism count. The offense is a Class 6 felony, normally punishable by one to two years in prison, but Wells had two prior felony convictions, so he was sentenced to 3.75 years in prison as a category three offender.
Public records show Wells’ criminal history dates back at least to a 2014 trafficking in stolen property incident for which he was placed on probation for 18 months starting in July 2015. He was discharged from probation in September 2016 but in August 2018, Wells was charged with aggravated assault and resisting arrest.
Wells would later plead guilty to the resisting arrest count and was placed on probation for three years. That term of probation was revoked after his arrest on the 2019 voyeurism charges and Wells would later be resentenced to one year in prison.
Fell also sentenced Wells to two years in prison after he pleaded guilty to being in possession of heroin in October 2019. The judge ordered Wells to serve the sentences for the drug and voyeurism convictions concurrently once the resisting arrest sentence is complete.
The Arizona Department of Corrections currently shows Wells as being eligible for release in February 2023.
