Opinion ID: 1204855
Heading Depth: 3
Heading Rank: 5

Heading: Sufficiency of Evidence of Live Birth.

Text: The courts in England have struggled with the question such as before us for centuries. The author of an article in 20 Law Quarterly Review 134, 142, commenting on the undependable evidence obtainable when birth is given to a child secretly, stated: Should the child soon die, someone (often it is not a medical man) must be present and observe both the birth and subsequent clear vital act; otherwise, there can be no reliable evidence of live-birth, for an expert can here certify few opinions. And the author states that out of fifty recorded charges during the preceding decade, acquittal of the charge of homicide most commonly resulted. On account of such difficulty of obtaining reliable evidence, England passed a statute making concealment of births a crime and making that a misdemeanor. An annotation on the subject of infanticide is contained in 159 A.L.R. 523. It is there shown, that in order to convict of that crime, it is necessary for the state to prove beyond a reasonable doubt as part of the corpus delicti, first, that the infant was born alive, and second, if the infant was born alive that death was caused by the criminal agency of the accused. Counsel for defendant contends that neither of the requirements have been met by the evidence in this case. We shall cursorily examine the first of these requirements. It is stated in 2 Wharton's Criminal Evidence, 11th Ed., § 874: In infanticide, an independent circulation and existence of the child must be shown; the fact of the child having breathed is not conclusive proof that it was born alive. Such independent circulation and existence may be present, even though it is still attached to its mother by the umbilical cord    . See also Jackson v. Commonwealth, 265 Ky. 295, 96 S.W. (2d) 1014. The Court of Appeals of New York, as shown in People v. Hayner, 300 N.Y. 171, 90 N.E. (2d) 23, 25, in which there was evidence of a confession, gave little attention to the fact that the child had breathed saying in part: The expansion of the lungs was of no great moment because the legal test of live birth  possession by the child of separate circulation  made irrelevant the question whether the child had breathed or not   . The testimony of their medical experts was necessarily of slight or merely conjectural significance. For here no one claiming to be an eye or ear witness came forth and, where that is the case evidence of live birth precedent to speedy death is of a nature practically impossible to medical science. We have not had any satisfactory answer to the question, either out of medical books or in the cases that have been considered by the courts, as to when an independent circulation exists. Dr. Stuckenhoff testified that for a while after the infant has left the body of the mother, there is a pulsation through the umbilical cord, and that the cord is usually not cut until such pulsation through it ceases. One accordingly would think that until such pulsation through the cord ceases, no independent circulation exists. And since the doctor was not able to tell when that happened, we seem to be in the same situation as the Court of Appeals of New York, completely unable to tell whether there was a live birth. Before deciding this point however, we should prefer to have more light on the subject. The court in People v. Chavez, 77 Cal. App. (2d) 621, 176 P. (2d) 92, took a somewhat different view saying that it should be held that a viable child in the process of being born is a human being within the meaning of the homicide statutes, whether or not the birth has been fully completed. The court admitted that it took a departure from the cases to the contrary and repudiated the common law rule that the presumption is that the child is born dead (See 20 L.Q.R. 146), but that the presumption is, according to experience, that the child is born alive. Whether or not that should be the presumption when it is shown that a child is born with acute pneumonia and that such children frequently die, is another question.