High court says clean slate possible for convicted rapist

A recent Supreme Court decision that allowed a 28-year-old man — convicted as a juvenile — to have an attempted rape conviction expunged from his record has prosecutors worried about the ripple effects.

Spencer Houskeeper was 17 when police arrested him for sexually assaulting a 15-year-old Mountain View High School friend in his car in Orem in 1997. He said it was consensual, she said it was rape.

The juvenile court ruled his crimes of aggravated sexual assault and forcible sodomy were violent enough that Houskeeper should stand trial as an adult.

A 4th District jury later found him guilty of attempted rape, not aggravated sexual assault or forcible sodomy. He was sentenced to one year in jail and three years of probation.

However, Houskeeper continued to argue it was the ineffectiveness of his attorney, Michael Esplin, that put him in adult court with its harsher punishments and the inability to expunge his record.

Utah Code prevents expungement of first-degree felonies or registerable sex offenses.

So Houskeeper filed a post-conviction appeal — essentially suing the state for what he saw as a gross injustice during his case — and the Supreme Court just agreed with him.

"Houskeeper claims that if he had received effective assistance of counsel at the (juvenile) retention hearing, he would have been retained in juvenile court," according to the ruling issued by the Supreme Court. "Regardless of the disposition of his case there, his sentence would have been less severe."

Currently post-conviction appeals are limited to adults, according to the state prosecutor's interpretation of Utah's Post-Conviction Remedies Act, said Assistant Utah Attorney General Erin Riley. Houskeeper's case was the first post-conviction appeal from a convicted juvenile, Riley said.

"One of my main concerns is that the court has appeared to attempt to find a remedy for this individual case, but the remedy they've provided might open up all kinds of problems and difficulties in all kinds of other cases," Riley said. "Juvenile court wasn't set up to give you a break if you committed a crime when you were young. It was set up to help someone who was young, while they were young. Once you've aged out of that, it creates a whole huge problem because if you're complaining about your (case), you're too old to ever go back. Then what is the appropriate remedy?"

But the Utah Supreme Court was clear that post-conviction relief is not just for adults.