photo by: Kansas Department of Corrections

Erick W. Ogwangi

The Kansas Court of Appeals on Friday affirmed the rape conviction of a Lawrence man who was found guilty in 2021 of assaulting a houseguest.

Erick Ogwangi, now 39, was accused of violently forcing himself on a 26-year-old woman who was a guest in his home in 2017. In 2021, he was convicted by a Douglas County jury of one count of rape after about an hour of deliberations.

After the trial, Ogwangi appealed his conviction, claiming that there were several errors during the proceedings that warranted a new trial. But the Court of Appeals reviewed the case and determined that only one of them was actually an error, and that it wouldn’t have made a difference in the verdict.

One of Ogwangi’s arguments, according to the Court of Appeals’ decision, was that a phone call between himself and the woman that was used as evidence in the trial was conducted illegally.

As the Journal-World reported, the woman made a call from the police station in which she told Ogwangi she “didn’t understand why he would do that.” Ogwangi could then be heard saying he didn’t know either, and that “I don’t know what came over me.”

Ogwangi argued on appeal that because the woman had called him at the direction of police, he should have been entitled to a Miranda warning advising him of his rights. But the Court of Appeals ruled that the conversation was not conducted by police and that the statements Ogwangi made during the call were voluntary.

The court reviewed several other accusations of prosecutorial error but determined only one of them to be credible. That one had to do with an analogy in the opening and closing arguments from Assistant District Attorney Emily Hartz and Deputy District Attorney Joshua Seiden. They compared the case to a jigsaw puzzle, in which “Even if there is a missing piece, we still know what that puzzle looks like.”

Ogwangi argued that the state improperly “watered down its burden of proof” with this analogy, and the appeals court agreed, saying that it “could leave the impression that once the jurors can recognize the picture, the State has met its reasonable doubt burden of proof.”

“We must be blunt,” the court wrote. “It is a misstatement of the law and outside the wide latitude permitted prosecutors to use a puzzle-with-a-missing-piece analogy to discuss the reasonable doubt standard during opening and closing arguments.”

Despite this error, the court ruled that the jury had been properly instructed on the burden of proof elsewhere in the trial and “there was no reasonable possibility that the error contributed to the verdict.”

Before being charged, Ogwangi ran Carpe Diem Community Living LLC, which was licensed by KDADS to provide residential and day services for developmentally disabled adults at locations in Lawrence, as the Journal World reported. His earliest possible release date with good time credit would be in October 2031, according to Kansas Department of Corrections records.