Title: Tipton v. State

State: florida

Issuer: Florida Supreme Court

Document:

97 So. 2d 277 (1957)
John H. TIPTON and Alto Lee Tipton, Jr., Appellants,
v.
STATE of Florida, Appellee.

Supreme Court of Florida.
October 2, 1957.
*278 Marion B. Knight, Blountstown, for appellants.
Richard W. Ervin, Atty. Gen., and B. Jay Owen, Asst. Atty. Gen., for appellee.
DREW, Justice.
The defendants were convicted of manslaughter under Section 782.07, Florida Statutes 1955, F.S.A.:
The information charged that the defendants "did unlawfully and feloniously, by their act, procurement and culpable negligence and with utter disregard for the life and safety of H.D. Stevenson, did kill the said H.D. Stevenson by pushing, shoving and ill treating the said H.D. Stevenson".
Chronologically, but not causally stated, the following rapid concatenation of events took place: the defendants stopped at deceased's filling station to purchase gasoline; in the course of the transaction there was a certain amount of arguing between defendants and deceased over deceased's refusal to cash a check for one of the defendants; the defendants allegedly pushed deceased, but did not hit him; deceased fell to the floor and ostensibly died of a heart attack.
Our search is directed to the proposition of determining whether the evidence supports the jury verdict and whether the trial judge correctly instructed the jury as to the conduct which is proscribed by the manslaughter act. The only testimony which connects these defendants in any way with the death of deceased is that of deceased's wife, Mrs. Stevenson, and for this reason we include an extensive portion of her testimony [Mrs. Stevenson]:
The trial judge charged the jury in the following manner:
From the evidence and the charge we conclude that the jury could have found that the defendants placed their hands on deceased and that both defendants were drunk, disorderly and cursed deceased in the presence of his wife. The actual medical cause of death is unknown.
Deceased was 63 years of age and had been consulting a doctor for the last four months prior to his death because of an advanced stage of Angina Pectoris which was due to a coronary artery disease. The record contains expert testimony that "when a person suffering with Angina becomes excited, gets mad, over-works or over-eats this Artery has a way of closing up." Such a reaction can cause death. However, there was no testimony in this record (which according to the instructions to the clerk contains all the testimony at the trial) to show any cause of deceased's death from a medical viewpoint. More specifically, there is no testimony to show a causal connection between the alleged "pushing, shoving and ill treating" and the death of deceased. The expert witness who testified had not examined the body and did not testify that a heart attack caused deceased to die, but death by heart attack was a basic assumption of the trial. The expert witness was asked the following crucial question:
Furthermore, the expert witness stated that before deceased's death there was no way to predict his life span: "We know a man having Angina Pectoris, at his age, was subject to have an attack at any time, we didn't know whether he would live a week, a month or how long he would live."
*281 The information charged manslaughter in the language of the statute, but instead of using the disjunctive "or" between "procurement" and "culpable negligence" it used the coordinate "and". Therefore a charge was given relating to culpable negligence. Naturally, the parties on appeal have discussed culpable negligence; but this case does not involve that doctrine. The crucial acts involved in the case at bar were the non-forceful, but rude pushes of defendants' hands against deceased. Human experience does not warn against such acts as being physically harmful when perpetrated upon people generally, and defendants were not put on notice of unusual conditions in deceased which would change the objective view of the risk. Their acts in relation to the circumstances were reprehensible, but did not amount to reckless disregard of human life or of deceased's safety. Futhermore, for purposes of analysis the act was an intentional, as opposed to a negligent, touching of deceased. Since neither procurement nor murder is involved, the active ingredients of Section 782.07 in the case at bar are the killing of a human being by the act of another, provided that such killing is not "justifiable or excusable homicide." The charge on culpable negligence might well have confused, but should not have affected, the jury in rendering its verdict; since in effect the trial judge charged that if the defendants made the alleged "assault" on deceased and if such "assault" caused deceased's heart attack, the jury must find defendants guilty of manslaughter.
By taking a broad definition of criminal battery: "It seems that any injury whatsoever, be it ever so small, being actually done to the person or a man in an angry, revengeful, rude, or insolent manner, as by spitting in his face, or any way touching him in anger, or violently jostling him out of the way, are batteries in the eye of the law;[1]" receiving uncritically a treatise writer's statement of "the law": "If one assaults another, but not in a way to naturally cause death or great bodily harm, he is guilty of a criminal act, and if death ensues, though contrary to his intention and wish, the homicide is manslaughter;[2]" and accepting the causal connection between the "pushing" and a fatal heart attack, there was in this case an unlawful act which caused the death of a human being  ergo: the act was manslaughter. That is the situation if logic rather than the broad implications of the statute rule decision.
Logic, however, is not the sole tool of adjudication. While it might satisfy a possible desire for revenge, entertained by deceased's relatives or friends, the punishment of the defendants for manslaughter can satisfy no public aim. Even legal philosophies which posit vengeance as a basis for criminal punishment require punishment to be proportionate to the act punished.
Consideration of the act in its surroundings at the time of its commission, not of the results alone, should determine criminal responsibility for manslaughter under the Florida homicide statute. It is necessary for the act to result in the death of a human being under the definition of homicide; but this does not relieve the courts of a duty to study the act itself to determine whether the punishment for manslaughter should be applied. This conclusion does not require the use of the shibboleths, malum prohibition and malum per se. The statute itself provides far surer guideposts.
It is clear from reading the provisions of Section 782.02, justifiable homicide, and Section 782.03, excusable homicide, *282 to which one is lead by the definition of manslaughter in Section 782.07 that every act causally connected with the killing of a human being is not punished by the homicide chapter, and more specifically, not by the general manslaughter statute. There is no need to record here any of the exemptions other than the one which is broad enough to cover the situation at hand: "Homicide is excusable when committed * * * by accident and misfortune in the heat of passion, * * * upon a sudden combat, without any dangerous weapon being used and not done in a cruel or unusual manner." The noun "combat" has many meanings attributed to it in dictionaries  running from, "an encounter or fight between two armed persons," to a figurative use, "a conflict; struggle; strife; controversy." Oxford English Dictionary (Oxford 1933). To most of us who translate literary terms for our own times it means, either literally or figuratively, a fight. Defendants' conduct  a battle of vituperation, climaxed by rude pushes  falls within the connotation of a figuraive combat. The circumstances of the case required the trial judge at least to charge the jury upon the principle expressed in the homicide statute previously considered, that "Homicide is excusable when committed * * * by accident and misfortune in the heat of passion * * * upon a sudden combat, without any dangerous weapon being used and not done in a cruel or unusual manner." This point was not covered in the charge.
Apparently the trial court's charge was based in part upon Williamson v. State, 1926, 92 Fla. 1094, 111 So. 245, 247. The relevant charge in the Williamson case is as follows:
The court in the Williamson case did not approve the charge in a positive way, but held:
Even if the court had approved the charge in a positive manner under the circumstances of the particular case, such approval must be restricted to the particular facts of the case. The Williamson case was a prosecution for murder in the first degree wherein the defendant was convicted of murder in the second degree, defined as an unlawful killing of a human being "when perpetrated by an act imminently dangerous to another and evincing a depraved mind regardless of human life, although without any premeditated design to effect the death of any particular individual." The court's words illustrate the type of act which was involved in the Williamson case:
The act involved was required to be "imminently dangerous to the person assaulted", therefore the physical condition of the victim was only relevant as a part of the link connecting the act with the death  another element of the crime.
There are two cases which appear to give some support to the charge of the trial judge in the case at bar  Baker v. State, 1892, 30 Fla. 41, 11 So. 492, and Gainer v. State, 1930, 100 Fla. 164, 129 So. 576. [For a collection of cases, see 47 A.L.R.2d 1072.] The Baker case affirmed conviction of defendant for fourth degree manslaughter. The defendant, provoked by a letter written by the victim, went to victim's house where he was reclining on a couch. After a brief altercation defendant struck the victim twice in the face without excessive force. The victim died of a ruptured blood vessel in the brain. The following quotations from the opinion in the case are relevant to our discussion [30 Fla. 41, 11 So. 498]:
The court concerned itself with finding a causal connection between the assault and the death, and in a passing way disposed of an argument of defendant which the court interpreted as a contention that defendant must subjectively have foreseen the fatal results of his act in order for the manslaughter statute to apply. The court said "in other words, the fact that it could not reasonably have occurred to the defendant, or did not occur to him, that death was a probable result of the act, does not prevent a conviction of manslaughter in this degree." Such a holding can be granted as valid without affecting the decision in the case at bar, therefore we will not discuss Gainer v. State, supra, which involved the same point.
The court in the Baker case continued as follows:
Although the court in the Baker case did not decide the "argument horrible", which was stated in terms which might apply to the case at bar, and the manslaughter statute has been relieved of degrees, the similarities in the facts and in the elements of the Criminal Code of 1868, Section 18 (copied previously in this opinion) require an overruling of such parts of the Baker case as are in conflict with the present opinion. The Criminal Code of 1868 defined "excusable homicide" just as it is defined today. See McClel. Dig. p. 354, Section 24. However the court in the Baker case did not examine the possibilities of an application of "excusable homicide" to the facts of the Baker case as we have done with the facts in the present case.
The trial judge should have granted defendants' motion for a directed verdict the denial of which has been assigned as error, since the state failed to present any evidence to prove the cause of death or, even if proper instruction had been given, to prove that these defendants were guilty of manslaughter. See Section 918.08(1), Florida Statutes 1955, F.S.A.
Reversed.
TERRELL, C.J., THORNAL, J., and STURGIS, District Judge, concur.
HOBSON and ROBERTS, JJ., dissent.
[1]  Hawkins Pleas of the Crown (Curwood Ed. 1824) p. 110, Section 2. Also cf. the adoption of similar criteria for tort liability. Restatement, Torts Section 18.
[2]  Clark and Marshall, Law of Crimes (5th Ed. 1952) Section 263(b), p. 355. See also, I Hale's Pleas of the Crown (Stokes Ed. 1847) p. 474, footnote 4, or IV Blackstone's Commentaries (Lewis Ed. 1898) pp. 192-193.