Court Opinion

ID: 9758739
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-28 23:42:58.869356+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T07:28:55.075120
License: Public Domain

McEWEN, Judge,
concurring:
The able and certain expression of view provided by our esteemed colleague Judge James R. Cavanaugh quite perceptively distinguishes between the concept of reasonable medical certainty and the legal notion of reasonable doubt before concluding beyond question that there was sufficient evidence that robbery was the cause of the homicide to enable a jury to conclude that appellant was guilty of *30murder. I share that conclusion and write simply to provide emphatic rejection of this particular assertion of appellant.
The word “prey” is defined by Webster as one who is helpless or unable to resist attack. It was shortly after darkness had fallen that the victim, a 70 year old man measuring just over five feet and 145 pounds, became prey for three predators, all of them young men and one of them appellant. The victim, as has been noted, had been suffering from arteriosclerotic heart disease and the postmortem reveals that the cause of death was arteriosclerotic heart disease aggravated by assault and battery.
The argument of appellant would permit the very disability which caused the victim to become prey to be the basis by which the predator escapes responsibility for the killing. The disability of the victim was the trigger for the crime. We cannot permit it to be the excuse for the crime.
When a gun is fired and causes a death during the commission of an armed holdup, the law declares the killing to be a felony-murder and rejects the protests of the robber that he had no intention to kill, since such a killing was a clearly foreseeable result of an armed holdup. The death of an elderly victim in the choke of a mugger is every bit as foreseeable and, therefore, no less a felony murder.
I agree there is no merit to the remaining contentions of appellant and would affirm the judgment of sentence.