Appellate court upholds robbery, conspiracy convictions

A northern Indiana man who planned and executed the robbery of a home after being invited to stay at the residence has lost his appeal of his convictions and sentence before the Indiana Court of Appeals.

While babysitting Talanda Peck’s children in May 2017, Tyshawn Owens invited his friends Jason Gibson and Shayla Brazier to spend the night with him and the children. The invited guests accepted the invitation, then used their knowledge of Peck’s home to begin planning a robbery the next day. Gibson and Brazier worked with two other individuals, including Deangelo Dove, to disable Peck’s video surveillance system, tie up two of her children and Owens and steal a vacuum, a pair of shoes and multiple electronics.

Owens and the children were able to free themselves and report the robbery, and Gibson eventually told officers at a police station about the plan and pointed the officers to the stolen items. He was later found guilty of one count each of robbery and conspiracy to commit robbery, both as Level 3 felonies, and was sentenced to an aggregate of 17 years.

On appeal in Jason Michael Gibson v. State of Indiana, 18A-CR-743, Gibson first argued the St. Joseph Superior Court committed fundamental error when it entered conviction on the conspiracy charge, arguing he was not charged with conspiracy when the state filed its last amended information in January 2018. But the Court of Appeals disagreed, noting the conspiracy charge was added in a December 2017 amendment and was not dismissed by the January amendment.

“We note that the better practice would be to include both the unamended charges and the amended charges in a single, clean charging document before the start of trial so as to avoid the type of confusion presented here,” Judge Edward Najam wrote Tuesday. “But there is nothing that prohibits what the State did here.”

The court also upheld the admission of Gibson’s inculpatory statements to police at trial, noting one of Peck’s children testified to seeing Gibson helping another man steal items from the home. That circumstantial evidence would support a reasonable inference of a planned robbery, Najam said, so Gibson’s argument that the state failed to establish a corpus delicti fails. Further, Gibson’s challenge to 8-year-old T.O.’s testimony fails because he did not object to it at trial.

Gibson then argued his convictions violated double jeopardy principles, but the court also disagreed on that issue, finding instead that “the court instructed the jury in relevant part that the State had to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that either Gibson or Dove committed the overt act of entering Peck’s residence in furtherance of their agreement to prove conspiracy.”

“…That evidence has no relation to the evidence supporting the robbery charge, which required only proof that Gibson aided Dove in stealing items from the presence of T.O., which T.O.’s testimony supports,” Najam said.

Finally, the court upheld Gibson’s 17-year sentence, finding the trial court was not obligated to accept Gibson’s proposed mitigating factors: his youth and his remorse.