Court Opinion

ID: 9558422
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-21 17:09:22.019421+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T09:09:13.069504
License: Public Domain

MANNHEIMER, Judge,
concurring.
I agree with Judge Stewart’s resolution of this case. I write separately to explain more fully why Ward was not entitled to a jury instruction on “transferred intent”.
The common-law doctrine of transferred intent was, in effect, an addendum to the definition of murder. If a defendant, acting with malice aforethought, engaged in conduct intended to bring about the death of one person, and in so doing the defendant accidentally caused the death of another, the defendant would be guilty of murdering this unintended victim:
[As] was stated by Lord Hale, and repeated in substance by Blackstone, ... “if A by malice aforethought strikes at B and missing him strikes C whereof he dies, tho he never bore any malice to C yet it is murder, and the law transfers the malice to the party slain.”
R. Perkins & R. Boyce, Criminal Law (3rd edition 1982), p. 922.
Hale and Blackstone are among the luminaries of the common law. But as Perkins & Boyce points out, it is “a misleading half-truth” to say that the defendant’s malice was “transferred” to the unintended victim.1 Rather, the defendant is chargeable with murder because (1) common-law murder was defined as the killing of any person with malice aforethought, and (2) “malice aforethought” was defined as an intent to kill anyone (not necessarily the eventual victim) when the killing was neither mitigated, justified, nor excused.2
Alaska’s modern-day definition of first-degree murder statute incorporates this same common-law concept; an intent to kill anyone suffices to establish the mens rea of the crime. Under AS 11.41.100(a)(1)(A), a defendant commits first-degree murder if, “with intent to cause the death of another person, the [defendant] causes the death of any person”. Thus, it is misleading to speak in these circumstances of the defendant’s “transferred” intent to kill.
Moreover, as explained in Perkins & Boyce, the misleading nature of this description is revealed more fully when a defendant seeks the benefit of a “transferred” innocent intent.
For example, B might [be] making a murderous assault upon A under such circumstances that A was privileged to kill B in the lawful defense of [his] life.... If, under those circumstances, A should shoot at B in the proper and prudent exercise of his privilege of self-defense, and should happen unexpectedly ... to cause the death of C, [then] A should be free from criminal guilt.
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[But this] hypothetical situation ... supposes not only the privilege to direct deadly force against B in the defense of A’s life, but also the proper and prudent exercise of this privilege. If ... [A] exercised this privilege so imprudently and improperly as to constitute a criminally-negligent disregard of the life of the innocent bystander, C, [then] the killing of C would be manslaughter.
Perkins & Boyce, p. 922-23.
In other words, even though a person is under attack and is properly defending himself, he continues to owe a duty of care to bystanders. A person has no “transferred” privilege to attack and injure innocent third parties. Obviously, when a judge or jury assesses the reasonableness of the person’s actions, the judge or jury must take into account the fact that the person was justifiably defending himself from attack. But if, even given this extenuating circumstance, a defendant’s actions are still reckless or criminally negligent, then the defendant can be held criminally responsible for the death or injury of a bystander.
In Ward’s case, that bystander was Lori James. Because Ward was charged with recklessly inflicting injury on James, his duty of care toward James was specified in AS *53411.81.900(a)(3), the statutory definition of “recklessly”:
[A] person acts “recklessly” with respect to a result [here, injury to another person] ... when the person is aware of and consciously disregards a substantial and unjustifiable risk that the result will occur ...; the risk must be of such a nature and degree that disregard of it constitutes a gross deviation from the standard of conduct that a reasonable person would observe in the situation^]
If the jury believed that Ward was lawfully defending himself from his father, then this fact would obviously be crucial to any assessment of whether Ward’s conduct with the axe created an “unjustifiable risk” of harm to James, and whether Ward’s disregard of this potential danger to James constituted a “gross deviation from the standard of conduct that a reasonable person would observe in the situation”. But if Ward’s conduct did deviate to this degree from what society reasonably would expect under the circumstances, then he violated his duty of care toward James and he could properly be convicted of assaulting her.
Indeed, Ward’s own proposed instruction on “transferred intent” conceded as much. The proposed instruction would have instructed the jury that Ward could be convicted of assaulting James if the injury to James was “reckless” rather than “inadvertent”.
This principle having been conceded, there was little point in confusing the jury’s deliberations with notions of “transferred intent”. The true question — under both the actual jury instructions and Ward’s proposed instruction — was whether Ward acted “recklessly” with regard to the possibility that his conduct would cause injury to James. Because the court’s jury instructions fully and properly addressed this question, the trial judge could lawfully decline to give Ward’s “transferred intent” instruction.

. Perkins & Boyce, p. 921.

. See id.