Court Opinion

ID: 9732848
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-26 16:39:34.566489+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T18:26:35.150220
License: Public Domain

O’Connor, J.
(dissenting). I agree that assault while armed with a dangerous weapon, with intent to murder, requires an intent to kill. G. L. c. 265, § 18 (b) (1984 ed.). Commonwealth v. Henson, 394 Mass. 584, 590-592 (1985). I do not agree, however, that the charge adequately communicated to the jury the necessity of finding a specific intent to kill in order to convict the defendant on the indictments, nor do I agree that *181the charge did not create a substantial risk of a miscarriage of justice. I agree with the Appeals Court that the jury instructions contained error requiring reversal.
Before stating the reasons for my position on that question, I briefly digress to discuss another matter which is important enough to warrant special attention. In part one of its opinion, the court engages in an analysis of the retroactivity of Commonwealth v. Henson, supra. The court’s approach, required by its unwarranted assumption that Henson is “a pronouncement of decisional law,” ante at 173, is patterned after our analysis of the retroactivity of decisional law in Commonwealth v. Breese, 389 Mass. 540, 541 (1983). In Breese, we said that if a judicially created principle of law is “new,” that is, if it represents “a clear break with the past,” and if it meets certain other criteria, it will apply prospectively only. Id. at 541-542, quoting Desist v. United States, 394 U.S. 244, 248 (1969). But we recognized in Commonwealth v. Marley, 396 Mass. 433, 437 (1985), that that type of analysis is inappropriate when the question, as here, is whether retroactive application is to be given to a statute. Whenever a court interprets a statute, the court does not announce a new principle of law but only defines or clarifies the law previously enacted by the Legislature. See Commonwealth v. Burkett, 396 Mass. 509, 512 (1986); Commonwealth v. Marley, supra at 437. Therefore, our decision in Commonwealth v. Henson, supra, interpreting G. L. c. 265, § 18, is necessarily retroactive to the date that statute became effective. To engage in a Breese type inquiry in this case is not only unnecessary, therefore, but unnecessarily creates confusion.
Turning to the question whether the jury instructions contained reversible error, in my view it cannot reasonably be said that, in a case like this, where the defendant is accused of shooting at pursuing police officers, there was no substantial risk of a miscarriage of justice even though the jury might fairly have understood from the judge’s instructions that they could convict the defendant without finding that he intended to kill one or more of the officers. In other words, it cannot fairly be said that, if the jury reasonably understood they could *182convict the defendant on a finding that he intended to inflict nonfatal wounds or merely to scare his pursuers off, there nevertheless was no substantial risk of a miscarriage of justice. The court does not appear to disagree with that assessment, but concludes that, viewed in their entirety, the instructions were adequate.
In my opinion, the jury instructions, viewed as a whole, did not adequately communicate to the jury the necessity of their finding a specific intent to kill in order to convict the defendant. It is true, as the court observes, that in his instructions the judge repeatedly referred to the requirement of a specific intent to kill. But, on each such occasion, he spoke not merely of a specific intent to kill, but of a “specific intent to kill with malice aforethought.” He made malice aforethought a part of the formula, and defined it in the context of murder. “Malice,” he said, “includes any unexcused intent to kill, to do grievous bodily harm, or to do an act creating a plain and strong likelihood that death or grievous harm will follow.” The court characterizes that instruction on malice as “extraneous” and “superfluous,” but it is highly unlikely that the jury considered the judge’s lengthy description of malice as extraneous and superfluous. It is far more likely that they gave meaning to the malice instructions by construing them to mean that the mental state required for assault by means of a dangerous weapon, with intent to murder, is the same as the mental state required for murder, namely an intent to kill, or to do grievous bodily harm, or to do an act creating a plain and strong likelihood of grievous bodily harm or death. Surely, there is a substantial risk that the jury understood the judge to be saying that the only difference between murder and assault with intent to murder is that the former requires that the victim has died, and the latter does not.
Nothing was said to correct the jury’s probable misunderstanding of the law. The judge’s statement, relied on by the court as corrective, that “[wjhen a killing is shown to have been committed without justification and as a result of a deliberate act on the part of a defendant, then it is proved sufficiently to have been done with malice aforethought,” simply is not *183corrective. However correct that instruction might be with respect to murder, it is not correct with respect to assault with intent to murder. It would have been consistent with that instruction for the jury to have convicted the defendant on the ground that he deliberately shot at the police officers without intending to kill any of them, but intending only to injure them or scare them off. Thus, the instructions were erroneous, and they created a substantial risk of a miscarriage of justice. I would reverse the convictions.