Court Opinion

ID: 9466060
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-05 01:04:28.723526+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:39:31.556766
License: Public Domain

MERRILL, Circuit Judge,
dissenting:
I dissent.
The majority holds that the statutory language “without due caution or circumspection” must be construed to require gross negligence or the knowledge of such circumstances as would have made reasonably foreseeable to the defendant the peril to which his acts might subject others. Whether this is or is not the proper standard to apply in involuntary manslaughter is a question I do not reach. I assume, arguendo, that it is. It was the one adopted by the district court in instructing the jury as to the meaning of the statutory language.
I disagree with the majority in its conclusion that the imposition of this standard amounts to adding a new element to the crime of involuntary manslaughter, which element must be expressly stated in the indictment,
A distinction must be made between two different situations: (1) Where judicial or decisional gloss adds new elements to a crime;1 (2) Where the gloss does no more than define the meaning of an element set forth in the statute. In the former case the newly added elements must be included in an indictment. In the latter case no new element has been added. The element set forth in the statute which has been judicially defined takes on the meaning given to it by the judicial definition. In this sense the statutory language has become a term of art. When it is used in an indictment it carries with it the judicial definition. This is the case here. Gross negligence and foreseeability of harm are not required in addition to a lack of due caution and circumspection. They constitute that lack. Absent gross negligence and foreseeability of harm there is no such lack, and the statutory element has not been established.
In such a case the jury must, of course, be instructed as to the meaning of the language used in the statute just as it must be instructed as to the meaning of any element as statutorily expressed. Here the trial jury was so instructed. Since the necessary elements for involuntary manslaughter were detailed in the indictment, we should also assume that the grand jury received appropriate instructions as to the meaning of language used in the indictment, and that when it found a lack of due caution and circumspection the jurors understood what that language meant.
To require that an indictment not only contain the elements of a crime but also precisely set forth the definition judicially given to the statutory language could start an interminable definitional process and render every indictment subject, after the fact, to objections now required to be made before the fact as to jury instructions. Here, it could be argued that gross negligence would in turn have to be defined. If “wanton disregard” is used in defining it, it could be argued that the term also would have to be defined.
I would affirm.

. An example, perhaps, could be United States v. Pardee, 368 F.2d 368 (4th Cir. 1966), cited in the majority opinion. There it was held that where an involuntary manslaughter charge was alleged to be based on an unlawful act not amounting to a felony (the first branch of the crime; we are here concerned with the second), that act must not only be unlawful; it must also amount to gross negligence.