Opinion ID: 1346679
Heading Depth: 1
Heading Rank: 3

Heading: State v. Crane

Text: 3. This is not, however, an original matter. The same legal issue was presented, in much the same factual scenario, nearly 30 years ago in Crane . In that case, Crane and three confederates were burglarizing a home when the homeowner shot and killed one of them in defense of himself and his property. See 247 Ga. at 779, 279 S.E.2d 695. The Court recognized that the case turned on whether the term he causes, as used in the felony murder statute, can extend to the death of an accomplice killed by the intended victim. Id. In its one-and-a-half page opinion, however, the Crane Court did not consider the customary legal meaning of cause or look to our then-existing case law interpreting that term as used in the felony murder statute, the malice murder statute, and homicide and other criminal statutes in general. Instead, the Court baldly asserted that it was faced with the choice between limiting felony murder to deaths caused directly by one of the parties to the underlying felony or construing the statute to include also those deaths indirectly caused by one of the parties. Id. (footnote omitted; emphasis supplied). Reflecting on the only two interpretations of he causes that it considered, the Court stated that [w]e would, if allowed a choice, favor the construction which would criminalize the conduct involved in the present case. Id. at 780, 279 S.E.2d 695. Because a criminal statute was being interpreted, however, the Court concluded that we are constrained by principle to rule in behalf of the accuseds. Id. We agree that the rule of lenity would require the Court to adopt the interpretation that favored the accuseds if, after applying all other tools of statutory construction, the Court determined that directly causes and indirectly causes were the only possible meanings of the word causes in OCGA § 16-5-1(c) and that equally strong reasoning supported either interpretation, leaving the statute ambiguous. See Banta v. State, 281 Ga. 615, 617-618, 642 S.E.2d 51 (2007) (`The rule of lenity ... applies only when, after consulting traditional canons of statutory construction, we are left with an ambiguous statute.' (quoting United States v. Shabani, 513 U.S. 10, 17, 115 S.Ct. 382, 130 L.Ed.2d 225 (1994))). But the Crane Court did not apply the traditional canons of statutory construction before jumping to that conclusion, and the binary reading of the causation element proposed by the Crane Court finds no foundation in our legal tradition or our case law, none of which the Court mentioned. [5] Indeed, other than Crane and cases discussing Crane , we have found not a single instance in our extensive causation case law where the Court has suggested that the word causes can mean only directly causes or indirectly causes. To the contrary, we have consistently employed the more nuanced concept of proximate causation, which does not track the binary, and often unhelpful, direct-indirect dichotomy of Crane . Proximate causation imposes liability for the reasonably foreseeable results of criminal (or, in the civil context, tortious) conduct if there is no sufficient, independent, and unforeseen intervening cause. That definition would include, at least in some factual scenarios, a deadly response against one of the perpetrators by the intended victim of a dangerous felony like burglary or armed robbery.