OKLAHOMA CITY – The Oklahoma Court of Criminal Appeals has rejected the appeal of a Comanche County convict serving life sentences for rape and possession of pornography.
Raheem La’Monze Plater, 40, was convicted by a jury in October 2019 of second-degree rape of a 16-year-old girl in a Lawton apartment over a period of several days, and possession of juvenile pornography. Plater was given two consecutive life sentences but with the possibility of parole; however, he must serve 85% of the sentence on the pornography charge before he will be eligible for parole.
He also was assessed court costs, fines and fees totaling $3,675, which included a $175 victims impact assessment, a court-appointed attorney fee of $1,000 for his representation by the Oklahoma Indigent Defense System, a $188.40 district court administrative fee and a $125.60 court clerk administrative fee on collections, plus $590 in costs for empaneling 14 jurors who heard his case over a two-day period.
Plater’s attorney cited a dozen reasons why Plater’s judgment and sentence were unfair. The appellate court, though, concurred on just one relatively minor point.
State law decrees that before a victim compensation fee can be assessed, the trial judge must consider the severity of the crime, the prior criminal record, expenses of the victim of the crime, and the ability of the defendant to pay, as well as the economic impact of the victim compensation assessment on the defendant.
“Since the trial court did not make any inquiry into any of these factors, the [$175] fine imposed is illegal and should be vacated” and the case remanded to Comanche County District Court for a hearing, the Court of Criminal Appeals ruled.
With that one exception, Plater’s appeal was denied.
Plater, who was reared in California, has been convicted of seven felony crimes, according to court records. Those include three convictions in California of second-degree commercial burglary of two automobile dealerships in 2005 and a bank in 2008, and was ordered to pay restitution of $16,879.
Additionally, his California driver’s license has been suspended for the last nine years, records indicate.
Plater is confined at the Lawton Correctional and Rehabilitation Facility (LCRF), a private prison operated by The GEO Group under contract with the state Corrections Department.
He filed a handwritten lawsuit in Oklahoma City federal district court in August 2020 against six employees of the LCRF, accusing them of “impeding” his access to the prison law library. That case is still pending, federal court records indicate.