Opinion ID: 6498358
Heading Depth: 3
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: Serious and Obvious Disfigurement.

Text: There was sufficient evidence that the cuts across Sanchez’s face were a severe and obvious disfigurement, satisfying the first and third prongs above. The government introduced a series of photographs depicting the stab wounds to Sanchez’s face, two of which are appended to this opinion. Including Dr. Siram’s testimony, the evidence showed that the most prominent of Sanchez’s facial lacerations was “very deep,” about five inches in length, cut jaggedly across the center of Sanchez’s face, and required multiple layers of stitches. As to that particular wound, Dr. Siram also explained that care had to be taken to “approximate,” or bring together, Sanchez’s lip where it had been sliced open in order to prevent “rigorous scarring.” It goes without saying that “scars in the center of one’s face are more visible and prominent—and thus more disfiguring—than they might be elsewhere.” Gathy v. United States, 754 A.2d 912, 917 (D.C. 2000); Jackson, 940 A.2d at 992 (scarring on ear and shins not sufficiently “obvious” to sustain aggravated assault conviction). Sanchez’s injuries most closely resemble those in Gathy, where we held there was sufficient evidence to find a protracted and obvious disfigurement. 754 A.2d at 917-19. In that case, the defendant broke a beer bottle over a bouncer’s face, and 15 the bouncer sustained one laceration over his left eyebrow and another “extending from the bridge of his nose across his left cheek.” Id. at 918. It took forty-eight “layered” stitches to repair those wounds. Id. We determined the disfigurement was “protracted and obvious” in light of photographs—one taken minutes after the assault, and the other a week later—and medical records. Id. at 914-15, 918-19. As in Gathy, Sanchez’s facial wounds required dozens of stitches, 2 in layers, with the most prominent of the wounds running across the center of her face. On the flip side, the wounds here are dissimilar from those that we have held to be insufficiently obvious or severe to constitute an obvious disfigurement. Jackson, for instance, involved a series of cuts, none longer than four centimeters, to the victim’s ear, the back of her head, and her shins. 940 A.2d at 984. We held the resulting scars were not sufficiently prominent to support an aggravated assault 2 Unlike in Gathy, we do not know precisely how many stitches it took to suture the victim’s facial wounds. Dr. Siram estimated, based on the pictures, that fourteen stitches were used to close the gash to Sanchez’s forehead, and there are several other visible stitches mending the smaller wounds to Sanchez’s face. But Dr. Siram was not asked how many stitches were used in the wound cutting across the center of Sanchez’s face. Unlike the stitches in Sanchez’s forehead, which one can roughly count from the photographic evidence (as Dr. Siram did when testifying), one cannot approximate how many stitches were used in this deeper and longer cut based on the photographs alone because the stitches were in “multiple layers,” with some beneath the skin and not visible in the photographs. The precise number of stitches is not particularly important, and it is enough to say here that it took dozens of stitches to close Sanchez’s facial wounds. 16 conviction, though in doing so, we expressly contrasted the wounds with “deep cuts to the center of the victim’s face,” like the ones we confronted in Gathy and likewise confront here. Id. at 993. Central to our holding in Jackson was that the wounds were in areas “far less likely to have an appreciable effect on” the victim’s physical appearance than those in the center of the face. Id. Similarly, in Stroman v. United States, we said that a single cut to the forehead requiring fifteen stitches, caused by the defendant hitting her neighbor with a flip flop, “cannot reasonably be characterized as falling within the definition of great bodily injury.” 878 A.2d 1241, 1246 (D.C. 2005). 3 That injury is superficially 3 Stroman was not an aggravated assault case, but instead arose from a prosecution for attempted possession of a prohibited weapon (PPW) after the defendant hit somebody in the head with a flip flop. 878 A.2d at 1244. The question under the PPW statute is not whether a serious bodily injury was in fact inflicted, but instead whether an object was used in a manner “likely to produce death or great bodily injury,” which is synonymous with serious bodily injury. Id. at 1245 (emphasis added); Jackson, 940 A.2d at 992 n.5. The questions are substantially different—one might use an object in a manner that is quite unlikely to inflict great bodily injury, but nonetheless do so, just as one might use an object in a manner very likely to inflict great bodily injury, but fail to do so. Despite the disparate inquiries, Stroman seems to hold that the cut to the victim’s forehead was not a great bodily injury, and we have treated it as a holding on the question of what constitutes a serious bodily injury. Jackson, 940 A.2d at 992 (Stroman “held, as a matter of law,” that the injury was not “sufficiently severe and prominent to be deemed ‘protracted and obvious’”); cf. Cardozo v. United States, 255 A.3d 979, 991 n.8 (D.C. 2021) (Deahl, J., concurring) (discussing “precedent on precedent,” where there is some 17 similar to the gash running from Sanchez’s eyebrow to her hairline: both required about the same number of stitches and ran along the forehead, though Stroman does not offer a description (e.g., length, or precise location) beyond that. But unlike in Stroman, here we have multiple other stab wounds to Sanchez’s face in addition to the gash across her forehead. One of those additional wounds, about twice as long as Sanchez’s forehead wound, (1) was in a more prominent area of her face, running from her lip to the top and outer portion of her cheek, (2) required layered stitches, which there was no indication of in Stroman, and (3) resulted from being stabbed in the face with a knife, as opposed to hit with a flip flop. 4 Based on those additional factors, absent in Stroman, plus the similarities between these wounds and those in Gathy, we conclude the disfigurement here was serious and obvious.