Court Opinion

ID: 9795765
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-31 03:38:19.290678+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T08:36:18.167543
License: Public Domain

MATTHEWS, Justice,
with whom FABE, Justice, joins, dissenting.
Today's opinion holds that a drunken driver who causes a fatal accident can be guilty *925of reckless murder if he has a high blood aleohol content and a prior record of driving while intoxicated. I do not join in this conclusion.
The legislative history of our reckless murder statute makes it clear that the statute was meant to be confined to cases in which reckless conduct closely resembles an intentional or knowing murder. Conduct was contemplated that is similar in degree of risk to that which is encompassed in the phrase that governs knowing or intentional second-degree murder: "substantially certain to cause death or serious physical injury."1 The examples of such conduct offered by the senate committee which recommended the adoption of the statute were shooting into a tent or persuading a person to play Russian roulette.2
In my view, drinking too much-even way too much-and then attempting to drive safely is not substantially certain to cause death, nor is it comparable in terms of risk, or in terms of utility or anti-social mind-set, with these examples. As the court of appeals observed in Nettzel v. State:
For both murder and manslaughter, the harm to be foreseen is a death. Therefore, the significant distinction is in the likelihood that a death will result from the defendant's act. Where the defendant's act has limited social utility, a very slight though significant and avoidable risk of death may make him guilty of manslaughter if his act causes death. Driving an automobile has some social utility although substantially reduced when the driver is intoxicated. The odds that a legally intoxicated person driving home after the bars close will hit and kill or seriously injure someone may be as low as one chance in a thousand and still qualify for manslaughter. Where murder is charged, however, an act must create a much greater risk that death or serious physical injury will result, [3]
I agree with those cases and authorities that suggest that if a fatality caused by a drunken driver is to be murder rather than manslaughter, the driver must have engaged in egregiously unsafe maneuvers such as extreme speeding, wrong-way driving, or running stop lights.4 Merely being drunk and *926attempting without success to drive normally can be manslaughter, but not murder.5
Today's opinion may generate an unintended result. A prosecutor now will be able to charge murder whenever a repeat offender with a high blood aleohol reading causes a fatal accident. The murder charge will go to the jury and the jury will be instructed that it may consider the defendant's prior DWI record. But the defendant's record might not be admissible if the charge were merely manslaughter rather than murder.6Given the likely impact on the jury's deliberations of a prior history of DWI convictions, it may turn out to be easier in such cases to obtain a conviction of murder than a conviction of manslaughter.
For the reasons stated, I would revers‘e Jeffries's second-degree murder conviction.

. AS 11.41.110(a)(1).

. The senate report states 11.41.110(a)(2): concerning AS
Subsection (a)(2) describes conduct that is very similar to the "substantially certain" clause in subsection (a)(1).... An example of conduct covered by this provision would be shooting through a tent under circumstances where the defendant did not know a person was inside or persuading a person to play "russian [sic] roulette."
Commentary on the Alaska Revised Criminal Code, Senate Journal Supp. No. 47 at 10, 1978 Senate Journal 1399.

. 655 P.2d 325, 337 (Alaska App.1982).

. E.g., United States v. Fleming, 739 F.2d 945, 948 (4th Cir.1984). In Fleming the defendant traveled for some six miles at speeds of from seventy to one hundred miles per hour, swerving at times into oncoming traffic lanes before ultimately losing control and crashing into another car at seventy to eighty miles per hour in a thirty-mile-per-hour zone. The Fourth Circuit was concerned with distinguishing Fleming's conduct from manslaughter. In doing so the court stated:
In the vast majority of vehicular homicides, the accused has not exhibited such wanton and reckless disregard for human life as to indicate the presence of malice on his part. In the present case, however, the facts show a deviation from established standards of regard for life and the safety of others that is markedly different in degree from that found in most vehicular homicides. In the average drunk driving homicide, there is no proof that the driver has acted while intoxicated with the purpose of wantonly and intentionally putting the lives of others in danger. Rather, his driving abilities were so impaired that he recklessly put others in danger simply by being on the road and attempting to do the things that any driver would do. In the present case, however, danger did not arise only by defendant's determining to drive while drunk. Rather, in addition to being intoxicated while driving, defendant drove in a manner that could be taken to indicate depraved disregard of human life, particularly in light of the fact that because he was drunk his reckless behavior was all the more dangerous.
Id. at 948. See also Pears v. State, 672 P.2d 903, 909, 906 n. 1 (Alaska App.1983) (intoxicated defendant "drove recklessly, speeding, running through stop signs and stop lights and failing to slow for yield signs"; court "emphasize[d] that a charge of second-degree murder should only rarely be appropriate in a motor vehicle homicide. The murder charge in this case is supported by these] extreme facts"); Stiegele v. State, 714 P.2d 356, 360 (Alaska App.1986) (mur*926der conviction affirmed when drunk driver's vehicle left road in the process of attempting to negotiate a turn at eighty-five miles an hour: "Stiegele's prior substantial knowledge of the curve and the impossibility of negotiating it at high-speed served to justify a finding that Stie-gele attempted the turn knowing that in so doing he was substantially certain to cause his passengers' deaths").

. E.g., Blackwell v. State, 34 Md.App. 547, 369 A.2d 153 (1977) (alternative holding). In Blackwell the court reversed a second-degree murder conviction of an intoxicated driver who struck a cyclist. The defendant had a prior history of driving while intoxicated and there was evidence that the defendant's vehicle was weaving before and after the accident but it was traveling within the speed limit. Id. at 156. The court explained its conclusion that there was insufficient evidence of malice to present a jury question in part as follows:
[A] motorist who attempts to pass another car on a "blind curve" may be acting with such criminal negligence that if he causes the death of another in a resulting traffic accident he will be guilty of manslaughter. And such a motorist may be creating fully as great a human hazard as one who shoots into a house or train "just for kicks," who is guilty of murder if loss of life results. The difference is that in the act of the shooter there is an element of viciousness-an extreme indifference to the value of human life-that is not found in the act of the motorist. And it is this viciousness which makes the act "wanton" as well as "wilful." [quoting Perkins, Crmanat Law § 1 at 37 (2d Ed.)]
We do not believe that an inference of "viciousness'' or "extreme indifference to the value of human life" may be drawn from the past, although persistent, drinking habits of an accused.
Id. at 158. See also Park v. State, 204 Ga. 766, 51 S.E.2d 832, 834-35 (1949) (intoxicated driver who rear ended a truck stopped in the road could not be convicted of murder because "no other sufficient concomitant circumstances disclosed by the evidence ... would show it was such an act as naturally tended to destroy human life"); State v. Jensen, 197 Kan. 427, 417 P.2d 273, 288 (1966) ("'the fact the defendant was driving while under the influence of intoxicating liquor without more being shown, is not sufficient of itself to support an implication of malice as a matter of law"); People v. Thacker, 166 A.D.2d 102, 570 N.Y.S.2d 516, 520 (1991) (legally intoxicated driver who attempted without success to control truck before fatal accident should not have been convicted of murder); Commonwealth v. McLaughlin, 293 Pa. 218, 142 A. 213, 215-16 (1928) (mere fact that defendant was intoxicated at the time of accident could not sustain a conviction for murder based on malice inferred from wanton and reckless conduct).

. E.g. The superior court in this case exercised its discretion under Evidence Rule 403 by ruling the defendant's prior record would not be admitted on the manslaughter charge because the defendant's prior record would be more prejudicial than probative.