Court Opinion

ID: 9764748
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-29 03:38:40.105586+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T07:30:01.297024
License: Public Domain

RENDLEN, Judge,
dissenting.
At the outset it must be stated that I have little quarrel with the majority opinion’s section I or most of section II, and further that the cause was not reassigned to its present author because of any disagreement with the interpretation of case law and statutes contained therein. However, section III of the majority opinion effects changes in the law, the full import of which are neither legally justifiable nor fully described therein.
State v. Chernick, 278 S.W.2d 741, 746 (Mo.1955), unequivocally states that if two or more persons join to commit a crime, each may be liable for any other crime committed by one of their company “in pursuance of the common purpose, or as a natural or probable consequence thereof.” Accord, State v. Paxton, 453 S.W.2d 923 (Mo.1970); State v. Tolias, 326 S.W.2d 329 (Mo.1959); State v. Sneed, 549 S.W.2d 105 (Mo.App.1977); State v. Williams, 522 *468S.W.2d 327 (Mo.App.1975); State v. Brooks, 513 S.W.2d 168 (Mo.App.1973). In this case the preparations for the raid on the bank included wiping down and cleaning the firearms intended for use in the armed robbery. Handley not only witnessed and participated in the early phases of the operation but afterward helped deliver the weapons to another location. He then assisted in transporting the men and weapons toward the intended place of the armed robbery. The shooting of someone at the bank was indisputably a “natural or probable consequence” of the criminal activity in which Handley participated and it is of no moment it happened to be an “unexpected” bank guard who was ultimately shot. Hence under the authorities, Handley could validly have been convicted of second degree murder had it been charged in the indictment or substituted information. From this it must be said his conviction fails only because of a pleading deficiency. I save the Ashe v. Swenson estoppel and harassment issue for the moment.
The majority opinion, citing State v. Grebe, 461 S.W.2d 265 (Mo. banc 1970), announces in effect that one must knowingly aid and abet the homicide directly in order to be held accountable for it and that because Handley was “not even at the bank when the shooting occurred, and did not know a guard had died or who killed the guard . . . [h]e cannot have had a specific intent to aid and abet the assault or death of a particular individual . . . .” This statement contradicts the rule of Cher-nick and other authorities cited above and Grebe is inapposite because there the question of the foreseeability of felonious assault stemming from a planned robbery did not enter the case. In Grebe, defendant’s son fatally stabbed the victim during an altercation which also involved defendant and the victim’s son. The defendant herself was unarmed, but her son had a knife and had inflicted a non-mortal wound on the victim’s son just before turning his attention to the victim. Defendant was grappling with the victim when the stabbing of the victim occurred. The question was whether the evidence sufficiently supported a finding that defendant intentionally aided and abetted the fatal stabbing, an eviden-tiary question answered by this Court in the affirmative. However, Grebe did not involve the question Chernick addressed, i. e., the substantive liability of an aider and abetter who, as here, was shown by the evidence to have participated in planning an armed robbery for the subsequent crime (homicide) when his intentional participation in the robbery has been established by the evidence. The majority thus, quite without logical justification, implicitly overrules many prior decisions by citing Grebe, a case wherein the dispositive facts are distinguishable from those decisions and cannot properly be said to relate to the principles for which they stand.
This brings us to the majority’s assertion that the jury’s acquittal on the felony murder charge meant the jury found Handley did not participate in the attempted robbery. As the majority puts it, “The alleged aiding and abetting of the robbery attempt is the umbilical cord that connects the appellant to the killing. The jury cut that cord when it found the appellant not guilty of the felony-murder . . . .” In so doing the majority disregards the verdict of guilty of second degree murder, which must have been predicated on the jury’s finding that Handley aided and abetted the criminal enterprise.1 It is simply not correct to state that Handley, who stands convicted of murder second degree (albeit invalidly because of the pleading anomaly) was acquitted of aiding and abetting, and Ashe v. *469Swenson, 397 U.S. 436, 90 S.Ct. 1189, 25 L.Ed.2d 469 (1969), is inapposite. At most there is presented the question of an inconsistent verdict to which Ashe does not apply-
The facts of Ashe bear iteration. Six poker players were robbed while at their game. The State first prosecuted Ashe for the robbery of one of the players and the jury acquitted him, the Supreme Court of the United States saying of this first trial, “The single rationally conceivable issue in dispute before the jury was whether the petitioner had been one of the robbers. And the jury by its verdict found that he had not.” 397 U.S. at 445, 90 S.Ct. at 1195. The State then prosecuted Ashe for the robbery of one of the remaining poker players, and that conviction was ultimately voided on the ground that collateral estop-pel, as part of the fifth amendment guarantee against double jeopardy, forbade the second prosecution, “after a jury determined by its verdict [in the first trial] that the petitioner was not one of the robbers.” Id. at 446, 90 S.Ct. at 1195. An unequivocal acquittal had been rendered by the jury for the first crime and in that trial the defense was alibi; “identity” was the only issue. It was the subsequent trial for different crimes, more particularly the robbery of a different person from the same poker game which the court considered harassment and invoked the doctrine of estoppel. Handley could thus on remand properly be tried for manslaughter of the same bank guard which is not a separate crime but a lesser included offense of the principal crime charged, as I discuss below. The guilty verdict on the second degree murder charge represents a finding of fact adverse to the application of collateral estoppel because unlike Ashe who had been squarely acquitted, Handley was convicted of murder in the second degree for the killing of the same bank guard for which he must now be retried for manslaughter. In State v. Akers, 278 Mo. 368, 213 S.W. 424 (1919), the jury rendered verdicts of guilty on Count I of an information and of not guilty of Count II, but on examination the two counts were found to have charged the same crime in almost identical words. This Court found the judgment “too contradictory to support a judgment of conviction,” but likewise “too inconsistent to support a judgment of acquittal.” The double jeopardy clause of the Missouri Constitution was held inapplicable and the case was remanded for new trial because the verdicts “are too contradictory to be considered a verdict either of conviction or acquittal.” In the same vein, this Court held in State v. Cline, 447 S.W.2d 538, 543-44 (Mo. banc 1969), that a conviction of burglarious stealing could not stand when the jury simultaneously rendered a not guilty verdict on the underlying burglary. Citing Akers, the Cline court ruled the verdict was “incomplete and sufficiently ambiguous and confusing as to be insufficient to support either a judgment of conviction or acquittal. The verdict did not acquit defendant of burglary and he is not entitled to be discharged on the theory that it did.” The court concluded that a retrial would not offend the protection against double jeopardy because “there has been no acquittal of burglary and hence no question of double jeopardy arises.” The same holds true of the “acquittal” the majority finds for Handley: assuming arguendo that by its acquittal of felony murder the jury found Handley did not aid and abet the armed robbery, nevertheless by its guilty verdict on second degree murder it necessarily (and inconsistently) found Handley did aid and abet the armed robbery for the only evidence of his connection with the killing was his willing participation in and intentional contribution to the armed robbery attempt and this assistance aided in the killing which was a foreseeable consequence of the entire enterprise. The jury thus can be said to have concluded from the evidence that by his actions (as submitted in the murder second degree instruction) “defendant knowingly and intentionally aided or encouraged the persons who engaged . . . ” in the shooting and killing of Warren G. Jackson. The jury in effect found that the participation in the planning of, preparation for and partial participation in the robbery attempt *470constituted the knowing and intentional aiding and encouraging of the killing. In State v. Jewell, 473 S.W.2d 734, 738 (Mo. 1971), a murder second degree conviction. was upheld under a felony murder charge on evidence that defendant had participated in a burglary during which the victim had been murdered. The court there held, 473 S.W.2d at 738, “[I]f the killing is committed during the actual or attempted perpetration of one of the felonies enumerated in Section 559.010, proof of the underlying felony stands in lieu of and is the equivalent of-the necessary malice, premeditation, and deliberation and is tantamount to proof of first-degree murder.” Though Jewell and similar decisions of this Court are not controlling today in light of the change in the murder first degree statute discussed in the majority opinion, the evidence here clearly was supportive of the murder second degree conviction, and only because defendant was not “charged” with that crime under the new (1975) murder first degree statute was the murder second degree submission improper. It is for that reason and that reason only the conviction for murder second degree should be reversed. Stated otherwise the proof sufficed for the conviction under the instruction given but the “pleadings” do not support the submission.
As the federal appellate court for the 8th circuit has stated, “It is clear that prior acquittal [for a closely related but different crime] was . . . the linchpin of the Ashe decision, leading directly to and serving as the foundation for the ‘collateral estoppel’ doctrine applied.” Moton v. Swenson, 488 F.2d 1060, 1062 (8th Cir. 1973), cert. denied 417 U.S. 957, 94 S.Ct. 3086, 41 L.Ed.2d 675 (1974). In the case at bar there simply has been no conclusive determination of the fact issue of Handley’s aiding and abetting, hence Ashe v. Swenson is not controlling.'
Although the majority does not explicitly so state, implicit within its opinion is the proposition that Ashe v. Swenson does not permit inconsistent verdicts rendered by the same jury to stand as anything but an acquittal, thus estopping the retrial permitted under the Missouri authorities cited above. This thought has been rejected by numerous federal decisions. For instance, after considering decisions from every federal circuit court of appeals and the Supreme Court upholding validity of convictions even though rendered under inconsistent verdicts, the court of appeals stated in United States v. Fox, 140 U.S.App.D.C. 129, 132 n. 22, 433 F.2d 1235, 1238 n. 22 (1970): “[W]e do not understand Ashe v. Swenson . to mean that one tried for two different but interrelated offenses at the same time must be convicted of both for a conviction of either to stand.” Indeed it was the fact of the new charging for separate crimes and a new separate trial (after an earlier acquittal) which led to the reversal in Ashe v. Swenson. In United States v. Greene, 497 F.2d 1068, 1085-86 (7th Cir. 1974), the Seventh Circuit rejected the argument that Ashe affects the legal status of simultaneous inconsistent verdicts. The First Circuit stated in 1977, “The settled rule im the federal system is that it is the prerogative of the jury simultaneously to return inconsistent verdicts. . . . The jury’s deliberations have always been regarded as sacrosanct, and the adoption of appellant’s proposed exception would undermine the strong policy against probing into the jury’s logic or reasoning and would open the door to interminable speculation.3 ” In the footnote, the court added, “The eases appellant relies on . involve the very different situation in which a prior jury verdict is held to have a res judicata effect and to bar a subsequent prosecution.” United States v. Martorano, 557 F.2d 1, 9 (1st Cir. 1977) (emphasis in original). The District of Columbia Court of Appeals in United States v. Smith, 337 A.2d 499 (1975), refused to apply Ashe and its federal predecessors to bar the retrial of a defendant whose first trial ended in an inconsistent result. See also Hamling v. United States, 418 U.S. 87, 100-101, 94 S.Ct. 2887, 41 L.Ed.2d 590 (1974); United States v. Miller, 546 F.2d 320, 325 (9th Cir. 1976); United States v. Dennett, 551 F.2d 261 (10th Cir. 1977); Copening v. United States, 353 A.2d 305 (D.C.App.1976). I am persuaded by *471these authorities, and if the federal courts find no constitutional command from Ashe to treat inconsistent verdicts as an acquittal we should be reluctant so to do under the teachings of North Carolina v. Butler, - U.S. -, 99 S.Ct. 1755, 60 L.Ed.2d 286 (1979). Thus I find Ashe does not vitiate State v. Akers and State v. Cline.
Considering now the “pleading” question and whether the cause should be remanded for trial on manslaughter within the scope of the underlying “first degree murder” indictment, it should be noted that the 1975 revisions of the homicide statutes did not change the statutory definition of manslaughter in section 559.070, RSMo 1969, which provides: “Every killing of a human being by the act, procurement or culpable negligence of another, not herein declared to be murder or excusable or justifiable homicide, shall be deemed manslaughter.” Manslaughter does not require that a killing be intentional, much less premeditated with malice aforethought. As stated in State v. Williams, 442 S.W.2d 61, 64 (Mo. banc 1969), overruled on another ground, State v. Ayers, 470 S.W.2d 534 (Mo. banc 1971), “There is but one definition of manslaughter in this state, and that is contained in § 559.070, supra.” And we recognized in State v. Stapleton, 518 S.W.2d 292, 301 (Mo. banc 1975), “If the jury [does] not find the element of intent to kill, then the defendant [can] still be guilty of manslaughter because manslaughter does not require that element. Sec. 559.070, RSMo 1969.”
The first element of the new crime “first degree murder” is an “unlawful killing.” It cannot be seriously disputed that the term “unlawful killing” broadly encompasses manslaughter. Section 559.070, which defines manslaughter, excludes every kind of “lawful” killing, that is, all homicides either “excusable” (§ 559.050, RSMo 1969) or “justifiable” (§ 559.040, RSMo 1969).2 Those “unlawful killings” that constitute murder are also excluded, leaving all other “unlawful killings” as those constituting the crime of manslaughter. Therefore the “unlawful killing” required for new “first degree murder” includes manslaughter,3 and it was charged in the indictment returned against Handley. For these reasons I must dissent and would order remand that Handley might be tried for manslaughter without the necessity of filing new charges.

. The majority argues that appellant’s converse instruction referred only to the felony murder instruction because only in the felony murder instruction was a “robbery” referred to. However, it is important to note that the second degree murder instruction required the jury to find that “the defendant knowingly and intentionally aided or encouraged the persons who engaged in the conduct” constituting the second-degree murder. Thus the jury’s verdict of guilty on this charge, if we are to engage in parsing it, necessarily meant finding that Hand-ley participated in something which aided in the killing and that something was the attempted robbery.

. The portion of the new criminal code effective January 1, 1979, corresponding to §§ 559.-040 and .050 is revised chap. 563, RSMo Supp. 1977.

. In determining that remand is proper, I have examined defendant’s other allegations of error and find them to be without merit. A full discussion of the points was contained in the original opinion submitted for the court’s consideration but their reiteration here would serve no useful purpose.