Court Opinion

ID: 9650991
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-23 16:00:10.568379+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T18:12:28.502888
License: Public Domain

OBERLY, Associate Judge,
concurring.
I join the judgment of the court but write separately to explain my understanding of the “immediate actual possession” element of the carjacking statute. D.C.Code § 22-2803(a)(l) (2001).
The phrase “immediate actual possession” in the carjacking statute is borrowed from the District’s robbery statute. Winstead v. United States, 809 A.2d 607, 610 *492n. 3 (D.C.2002) (“ ‘Whoever by force or violence ... shall take from the person or immediate actual possession of another anything of value, is guilty of robbery.’ ”) (quoting D.C.Code § 22-2801). The seminal case on the meaning of “immediate actual possession” in the robbery statute, in turn, is Spencer v. United States, 116 F.2d 801, 802 (D.C.Cir.1940), which held that “immediate actual possession” refers “at least [to] an area within which the victim could reasonably be expected to exercise some physical control over his property.” We have repeatedly treated Spencer as authoritative on the meaning of “immediate actual possession.” See Beaner v. United States, 845 A.2d 525, 533, n. 7 (D.C.2004); Leak v. United States, 757 A.2d 739, 743 (D.C.2000); Rouse v. United States, 402 A.2d 1218, 1220 (D.C.1979); see also United States v. Gilliam, 167 F.3d 628, 640 (D.C.Cir.1999). Therefore, in Winstead, we concluded that for the purposes of the carjacking statute, a car is within a victim’s immediate actual possession if “ ‘the car is within such range that the victim could, if not deterred by violence or fear, retain actual physical control over it.’” Winstead, 809 A.2d at 610 (quoting Gilliam, 167 F.3d at 639-40).
Under this settled law, a rational jury could have found that Cox was in immediate actual possession of his ear. It is true that in other cases affirming carjacking convictions, the victim was closer to his car than Cox was to his Spyder, see Winstead, 809 A.2d at 611 (victim was a “few feet” away from his car); Beaner, 845 A.2d at 533 (same), or, unlike Cox, had evinced an intent to return to his car. E.g., Gilliam, 167 F.3d at 632 (“bank manager ... was opening the bank’s parking lot gate so that he could park his car, which was nearby with the driver’s door open and the engine running”); Beaner, 845 A.2d at 533 (similar). Having said that, nothing in our case law establishes that a person who is more than a few feet away from his car cannot, as a matter of law, be in immediate actual possession of his car. Nor do our decisions require the prosecution to prove that the victim intended to return to his car at the moment he was attacked — indeed, nothing on the face of the carjacking statute requires that the victim even know that his car is being stolen. Cf. Leak, 757 A.2d at 742 (“the District of Columbia’s statutory definition of robbery includes the stealthy snatching of an item, even if the victim is not actually holding, or otherwise attached to the object, or indeed is unaware of the taking”). In short, a jury easily could have concluded that at a distance of three car lengths, Cox could have regained control over his car had he not been deterred by his gun-wielding assailants. Sutton does not explain why the jury’s assessment of the facts was so out of bounds as to warrant reversal.1
*493Although Sutton challenges only the sufficiency of the evidence, the majority also examines — and criticizes—the carjacking instruction’s definition of “immediate actual possession,” as approved in Winstead, 809 A.2d at 610 n. 4. According to the majority, the instruction is flawed because it does not contain the words “violence or fear.” It is far from clear to me that the criticism is warranted. The “violence or fear” concept, after all, is present elsewhere in the instruction, albeit not in the definition of “immediate actual possession.” Specifically, the instruction says that to commit carjacking, the defendant must “knowingly use[ ] force or violence to take the motor vehicle,” explains that “putting the complainant in fear” is sufficient to meet the force-or-violence requirement, and emphasizes that “[t]o establish a carjacking, it is not sufficient that the defendant took the motor vehicle; s/he must have taken it using force or violence.” Instruction No. 4.51, “Carjacking,” in the Cmminal Jury InstRuctions foii the District of Columbia (4th ed. 1993). I am not convinced, therefore, that it is necessary or advisable to revise the definition of “immediate actual possession” to also include the words “violence or fear.” I doubt that any juror listening to the instruction would fail to appreciate that the government must prove that the victim was deterred by violence or fear from retaining control over his car, and certainly no credible argument can be made in this case that Cox was not so deterred. Even if I shared the majority’s doubts about the instruction, however, I would leave resolution of those doubts to a case where the instruction has been challenged and the issue briefed.
With these observations, I concur in the judgment of the court.

. Significantly, the federal courts of appeal have affirmed carjacking convictions in cases where the victim's control over his car was far more attenuated than in this case. E.g., United States v. Lake, 150 F.3d 269, 271 (3d Cir.1998) (Alito, J.) (affirming conviction where victim was robbed of keys and car was up a steep hill, “out of sight” of where the taking occurred); United States v. Kimble, 178 F.3d 1163, 1165 (11th Cir.1999) (affirming conviction where robbers took keys from victim inside restaurant and took victim's car that was parked outside). To be sure, the federal carjacking statute requires that the car be taken from the victim’s “person or presence,” 18 U.S.C. § 2119, not from the victim's "immediate actual possession.” Notwithstanding this difference, the federal cases are persuasive authority because under our case law the phrase “immediate actual possession” has no appreciable difference in meaning from the phrase "person or presence” in the federal cases. Compare Lake, 150 F.3d at 271 (under federal carjacking statute, a car "is in the presence of a person if it is so within his reach, observation or control, that he could if not overcome by violence *493or prevented by fear, retain his possession of it”) (quotation marks omitted), with Winstead, 809 A.2d at 610 (under District carjacking statute, a car is within victim’s immediate actual possession "if the car is within such range that the victim could, if not deterred by violence or fear, retain actual physical control over it”) (quotation marks omitted).