Court Opinion

ID: 9755456
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-28 20:38:40.953229+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T07:28:07.633508
License: Public Domain

A NNABELLE CLINTON IMBER, Justice, concurring. I agree .with the majority, but write separately only to point out the trial court instructed the jury in a manner that would permit it to return a guilty verdict against Williams on the capital murder count if it found him to have committed either one or both of the underlying felonies, first-degree escape or aggravated robbery. The jury returned a general verdict of guilty on the capital felony murder charge. The majority opinion concludes that a directed verdict should have been granted on the first-degree escape charge because the State produced insufficient evidence to prove that Williams committed first-degree escape. Specifically, there was no proof of the element of “use or threat [to] use ... a deadly weapon in escaping custody” as required under our criminal statutes for first-degree escape. Ark. Code Ann. § 5-54-110(a)(2)(Repl. 1997). Williams cites no case in which a general verdict has been set aside not because one of the possible bases of conviction was unconstitutional, as in Stromberg v. California, 283 U.S. 359 (1931), but merely because it was unsupported by sufficient evidence. In Griffin v. United States, 502 U.S. 46 (1991), the United States Supreme Court declined to set aside a general verdict on a multiple-object conspiracy where the evidence was inadequate to support conviction as to one of the objects. In so holding, the Supreme Court quoted with approval the following language fiom United States v. Townsend, 924 F.2d 385, 474 (7th Cir. 1991): It is one thing to negate a verdict that, while supported by evidence, may have been based on an erroneous view of the law; it is another to do so merely on the chance — remote, it seems to us — that the jury convicted on a ground that was not supported by adequate evidence when there existed alternative grounds for which the evidence was sufficient. Accordingly, the conviction of capital murder in this case should be affirmed without regard to the State’s proof on the charge of first-degree escape because there was sufficient evidence to convict Williams of capital murder committed in connection with the underlying felony of aggravated robbery.