Opinion ID: 1525908
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 2

Heading: Sufficiency of the Evidence Regarding the Specific Intent Element of Malicious Disfigurement While Armed

Text: Appellant next claims that the government's evidence was insufficient to establish the specific intent necessary for a conviction of malicious disfigurement while armed. [5] In assessing a claim of evidentiary insufficiency, we must view the record `in the light most favorable to the government, giving full play to the right of the fact finder to determine credibility, weigh the evidence, and draw justifiable inferences of fact.' Alfaro v. United States, 859 A.2d 149, 160 (D.C.2004) (quoting Perry v. United States, 812 A.2d 924, 930 (D.C.2002)). To prevail, appellant must show that the government presented `no evidence' upon which a reasonable mind could find guilt beyond a reasonable doubt. Mihas v. United States, 618 A.2d 197, 200 (D.C.1992) (quoting Robinson v. United States, 506 A.2d 572, 573 (D.C. 1986)). Citing State v. Jenkins, 307 Md. 501, 515 A.2d 465 (1986), appellant contends that a clear tension exists in finding both an intent to kill and an intent to disfigure because an intent to disfigure requires a belief that the victim shall survive. [6] Thus, the conviction for malicious disfigurement, appellant argues, must be overturned on the ground that the evidence is insufficient to support it. Specifically, appellant contends that the government presented no evidence that he intended maliciously to disfigure Ahmed before shooting him, but that the government is instead impermissibly using the result of his actions to infer his intent. We disagree and conclude that Jenkins supports the government's position rather than appellant's. In Jenkins, the Maryland Court of Appeals wrote: While we agree that the intents [i.e., to kill or to disfigure] are inconsistent, we do not agree . . . that the offenses are inconsistent. . . . Instead, we believe that there is logic in the State's suggestion that a perpetrator of an assault may harbor both intents at the time of the assault. Although the intents remain inconsistent or mutually exclusive, they can be held disjunctively. Thus, in committing an assault, the perpetrator might intend that the victim die. At the same time, the perpetrator might have an alternate intent that, if the victim does not die, he at least be maimed or disfigured or disabled. The fact that the intents may be mutually exclusive does not preclude their being held as alternatives by the same person at the same time. The second intent is held as a conditional matter, conditioned upon the first intent not being achieved. The criminal law recognizes the possibility of conditional and qualified intents. Id. at 516, 515 A.2d 465 (citing R. Perkins, Criminal Law, (2d ed.1969) at 575). Our case of Peoples v. United States, 640 A.2d 1047 (D.C.1994), is also helpful in analyzing the issue here. It reflects the broad leeway extended to juries to infer, from circumstantial evidence, the necessary specific intent for malicious disfigurement. That leeway is well illustrated by Peoples. After his girlfriend ended their relationship, Earl Peoples went to her parents' house in the early morning while those inside were still sleeping and deliberately set it on fire. Id. at 1055. One person was killed and five others were seriously burned; the survivors suffered varying levels of permanent disfigurement and disability. Id. at 1051-1052. Although Peoples had been heard to say that he would blow up the house and everyone in it if his girlfriend ever left him, Id. at 1056, he argued at trial that the jury could not infer the requisite intent from his deliberate act in starting the fire with a flammable liquid. Id. at 1055. In sustaining his convictions of five counts of malicious disfigurement while armed, we held that [i]t is reasonable to infer that appellant knew that the people inside the house would sustain grievous burn injuries if they escaped alive . . . . All of these circumstances evidence appellant's intent sufficiently to permit the jury to find that appellant had the requisite specific intent. . . Id. at 1055-56 (emphasis supplied). In so doing, this court also implicitly adopted the reasoning of Jenkins that a perpetrator could alternatively harbor the intent to disfigure in the event that he did not achieve his primary intent to kill. Thus, Peoples, like Jenkins, concluded that a perpetrator may harbor at the same time, on an alternative basis, an intent to murder and an intent to maim, disfigure, or disable. Id. at 1055. We conclude that this reasoning is sound and comports with the realities of human nature that at any given time a person may have both a primary objective and a secondary, fallback objective. In ruling on appellant's motion for judgment of acquittal on the charge of malicious disfigurement, the trial court pointed out that by its verdict of guilty on the charge of assault with intent to kill, the jury necessarily found that appellant intended to kill Ahmed, and noted that he had aimed precisely in his effort to do so, rather than firing wild shots. But although he had shot Ahmed once, and the bullet had entered Ahmed's body, this had not totally disabled him. It was immediately thereafter when Ahmed, though wounded, grappled with appellant for the gun, which was when appellantobviously aware that his first plan of killing both brothers had not workeddeliberately pointed the gun above Ahmed's right eye, angled the muzzle downward, and shot Ahmed point blank in the face, destroying his eyeball and causing the permanent disfigurement that forms the basis for the malicious disfigurement charge. While there was certainly sufficient evidence that appellant intended to kill Ahmed (and indeed it is a miracle that he did not), there was also sufficient evidence, in line with the reasoning of Jenkins and Peoples, that his alternative position when he shot Ahmed right in the face was to make that part of his body, most particularly his eye, to some appreciable degree less useful or functional than it was before the injury. And there is no question that appellant's alternative goal was met. Thus, we hold that the previous shots, combined with appellant's proximity to the victim, his clear calculation in committing the crime, and the fact that appellant intentionally shot Ahmed in a place on his body that would most certainly make it appreciably less useful or functional than before the injury, was sufficient to uphold the jury's verdict of malicious disfigurement.