Court Opinion

ID: 9759363
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-29 00:13:46.623143+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T07:29:01.530599
License: Public Domain

LUKOWSKY, Justice,
dissenting.
The majority quite correctly holds that it was prejudicial error to try Gunter for first-degree arson after he was convicted of only second-degree arson at his first trial and that a new trial on the charge of second-degree arson is required. Price v. Georgia, 398 U.S. 323, 90 S.Ct. 1757, 26 L.Ed.2d 300 (1970). However, the majority affirms the murder conviction thereby tacitly rejecting Gunter’s submission that the double jeopardy violation on the arson charge infects the murder conviction.
This result presupposes that the jury was able to isolate the murder and arson aspects of the joint trial onto separate and distinct projection screens and that the reflections of one had no halo effect on the other. The differential between first-degree and second-degree arson is knowledge or reasonable belief that another person, not an accomplice, is present in the building at the time the fire is set. The murdér charged *524here was intentional killing by strangulation. The first-degree arson charge was mentioned in the opening statement by the Commonwealth, in the trial judge’s instructions to the jury and in the closing argument by the Commonwealth. The jury could well have believed that one charged with and prosecuted for callously burning an inhabited building would not hesitate to intentionally kill.
The question is not whether Gunter was actually prejudiced by the double jeopardy violation, but whether there is a reasonable possibility that he was prejudiced. Fahy v. Connecticut, 375 U.S. 85, 86-87, 84 S.Ct. 229, 230, 11 L.Ed.2d 171, 173 (1963); United States ex rel. Hetenyi v. Wilkins C.A.2d, 348 F.2d 844, 864 (1965), cert. denied sub nom. Mancusi v. Hetenyi, 383 U.S. 913, 86 S.Ct. 896, 15 L.Ed.2d 667 (1966). I can only speculate what would have happened at Gunter’s trial had he been charged only with murder and second-degree arson. Under such circumstances I can not reach the legal conclusion that Gunter could not possibly have been prejudiced by repeated references to his burning an inhabited building. I am unable to reconstruct by hindsight on the basis of reasonable predictability of human behavior, a jurisprudential setting in which a jury could have been immunized, in theory or in fact, from the inflammatory references to callous behavior of which Gunter had been previously acquitted. Levy v. Parker C.A.3d, 478 F.2d 772, 797-799 (1973), cert. denied 420 U.S. 972, 95 S.Ct. 1392, 43 L.Ed.2d 651 (1975).
I would reverse the murder conviction as well as the second-degree arson conviction and remand the entire case for a new trial.
I am authorized to state that REED, J., joins in this dissenting opinion.