Court Opinion

ID: 9753128
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-28 18:59:37.025364+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T07:27:30.662640
License: Public Domain

Opinion by
Me. Justice Musmanno,
Concussing and Dissenting in Paet :
On July 22, 1953, Robert J. Flynn, 18 years of age, died as the result of serious burns accidentally received in a flash fire in an empty house (belonging to one Torti) in Dunmore, Lackawanna County, which fire he had himself ignited in pursuance of an arsonious plan probably entered into with the defendant, Daniel Bolish. Bolish was indicted for murder, and the jury returned a verdict of first degree murder with the death penalty. The evidence fairly well established circumstantially that Bolish was involved in the arson plot, which was to destroy for insurance purposes .the house in which Flynn was fatally burned, but it failed completely to place Bolish at the scene of the fire. •
The Commonwealth tried its case against Bolish on the theory that he was the instigator of the arson plan and that, therefore, he was guilty of what has been called felony-murder, under Section 701 of the Penal Code of 1939 which provides: “All murder which *528shall be perpetrated by means of poison, or by lying in wait, or by any other kind of willful, deliberate and premeditated killing, or which shall be committed in the perpetration of, or attempting to perpetrate any arson, rape, robbery, burglary or kidnapping, shall be murder in the first degree. All other kinds of murder shall be murder in the second degree.”
I do not believe that the framers of this criminal statute (enacted originally March 31, 1860) ever intended it to cover a situation such as the one involved here. At common law every felony was a capital offense. It, therefore, followed that any death which occurred in the perpetration or attempted perpetration of a felony was itself a felony and the perpetrator was punished because it was immaterial whether he was hanged for one felony or another. When some of the harshnesses and inhumanities of the criminal law were modified, the penalty of death was limited to treason and the more brutal crimes of violence; and the crime of murder itself was defined with some precision. Succinctly stated murder became the unlawful killing of another with malice aforethought. If unintentional death resulted during the perpetration of a felony the malice of the initial act carried over to the act of killing and it thus also became murder. The purpose of our statute of 1860 was to restrict this so-called felony-murder to the five most heinous offenses, namely, arson, rape, robbery, burglary and kidnapping. The “felony-murder thus became an integral and inseparable part of the antecedent individual offense. There is nothing in the history of the criminal law and the foundation of reason • supporting it-which justifies the rationalization that any fortuitous killing becomes murder simply because of proximity in time or place to the perpetration or attempted perpetration of a named felony. The killing has to be tainted with some *529elements of common law mnrder before the actor can be punished as a murderer.
It is to be noted that the Statute of 1860 says nothing about accidental death or even death generically. Using the words applicable to this case, we would read: “All murder which shall be committed in the perpetration of or attempting to perpetrate arson shall be murder in the first degree.” The subject of this statutory provision is murder, not killing. Thus, before there can be a felony-murder, there must be a murder. The death of Flynn was not per se murder. It had none of the ingredients of murder. It was not an unlawful killing inflicted by some one else and it was not done with malice. In order to hold Bolish guilty of murder under the circumstances of the Flynn death, the statute would need to have a different wording, namely, “All deaths which shall result in the perpetration of or attempting to perpetrate arson shall be murder in the first degree.”
It seems to me that this subject of felony-murder has been somewhat loosely treated in recent years. In the first place, the term itself is awkward and obscure. Why felony-murder? What does it mean? What does it comport? Every murder is a felony, but not every felony is a murder. I believe that in expressing the situation intended by the statute, the better term is the English one of constructive murder. A constructive crime is one which occurs when an original unlawful act develops, through no intention of the actor, into a second unlaAvful act, and the actor is charged with the second act. Before one can be charged with a constructive crime, however, it must be shoAvn that the second act was one committed in furtherance of the original criminal plan. In order to have constructive murder, there must be an unbroken continuity of circumstances between the attempted or completed felony and the *530death. Thus, if during a robbery there is an exchange of shots between the robbers and the police, and a policeman is killed, even by a bullet coming from a revolver in the hands of a fellow-policeman, all the robbers are guilty of constructive murder because the death occurred while the actors were engaged in the furtherance of the original criminal plan. This holds true even if the killing occurs while the robbers are escaping because of course this act is also part of the criminal plan, for, without the escape the contemplated criminal enrichment could not be achieved.
But in the case at hand the death of Flynn was not something within the scope of the arson plan. Instead of its being in furtherance of the criminal design, it was actually in hindrance of it. The death of an accomplice removes an executant of the enterprise and this fact might well cause a collapse of the entire criminal venture.
All forces of law and order are naturally interested in the punishment of criminals, but there is no more legal justification for electrocuting an arsonist when the law does not provide such a penalty than there was moral warrant for hanging pickpockets during the early days of the common law. Whatever Daniel Bolish did, it was not constructive murder and, regardless of the extent of his knavery, he should not suffer death for an act which does not fall within the provisions of the code for murder. The most energetic proponent of the felony-murder doctrine would scarcely argue that if Flynn had died of a heart attack while he was in the Torti home, Bolish would be guilty of murder. Nor could it be maintained that if Flynn had shot a bullet into his own head after igniting the fire in the Torti home, Bolish should be held for felonious homicide. But such hypothetical deaths are no more removed from Bolish’s intentions than was Flynn’s actual death, which was admittedly accidental.
*531There is no authority in Pennsylvania law which declares that a co-conspirator can be charged with murder for the accidental death of an accomplice during the perpetration or attempted perpetration of arson. The Trial Judge recognized this lack of authority and accordingly charged the jury: “The law of Pennsylvania, as I have told you, says that murder is the killing of another and one is not chargeable with murder for killing one’s self. That is, if he was the substantial cause of his own death, that as the substantial cause it superseded the other chain as the proximate cause of death, then in that event, even though you consider Bolish was a felon, you would have the right to find Bolish not guilty of the crime charged against him in this indictment.”
The Trial Judge said further: “If you do not find that the Commonwealth has proved to you beyond a reasonable doubt that this defendant, Bolish’s, action was the proximate cause of the harm and subsequent death of Flynn; that Flynn’s own willing, understanding action superseded, in the chain of events as the substantial cause of the harm to him, the original chain set in motion by Bolish, then you would have to acquit him.” This part of the charge was eminently correct. Naturally if the chain of events set in motion by Bolish was broken by an independent act of Flynn’s, Bolish could not be held responsible for what followed.
However, the lower Court seeks to sustain the verdict of first degree murder on a theory which has absolutely no substantiation in the record, namely, that Flynn was innocently within the Torti house. The circumstantial evidence establishes that Flynn entered the Torti house by means of a key to which he had no right, that after unlocking the door he returned the key to the pocket of his shirt which he later exchanged for a soiled shirt to wear while he was carrying and set*532ting the fuel with which the fire was to be made, and that as a trespasser in the Torti house at 1:45 in the morning he placed a container of kerosene-gasoline on an electric stove which heated faster than he anticipated and an explosion followed. He dived or was blown through a window and then stumbled on foot for two miles while in a horribly burned condition. When finally taken to a hospital, where he died, he related an obviously fabricated story that he had fallen into a pond and was burned when, in drying his clothes, he fell into a fire. There is literally nothing in the case to warrant the conclusion that Flynn was in the Torti house on some legitimate errand or, as suggested by the lower Court, he was a “dupe” or that he had been “abandoned by the perpetrator [Bolish] to his fate.”
Eager as police authorities, district attorneys, and even judges are to solve crime mysteries and to visit on criminals the punishment they deserve, neither abstract justice nor specific law will permit guesses and suppositions to take the place of evidence. The lower Court attempted to supply the break in the bridge of causation between Bolish’s arson plan and Flynn’s death by mounting a span which declared that Flynn was an innocent dupe, but this span crumbles at the slightest touch of analysis and the bridge falls with it. What would Flynn be doing in a strange house in the middle of the night? Why did he fabricate the so palpably untrue tale that he received his fatal burns while drying wet clothes? Flynn was not a third-person victim of a felony (the innocent person contemplated in the Act of 1860), but an active participant in the commission of a felony who came to his death through a fortuitous combination of circumstances not falling within any proposed contemplation of the felony.
In addition to the all-important reason that one not guilty under law of a capital offense should not be *533sent to Ms death, there is the all-vital matter to consider that this Court should not enlarge the scope of the Act of 1860 beyond its obvious purpose and objective. It has taken centuries to remove much of the inhumanity which originally formed part of criminal codes in all parts of the world. We must not revert to the thinking of the age when revenge and blind castigation dictated executive and judicial policy. That punishment deters much crime cannot and will not be disputed. Nor can it be denied that, despite the philosophy of benevolence and forgiveness, there has not yet been found a substitute for punishment for certain crimes. However, punishment, in order to be effective, must be logical and scientific. It cannot be mandated through blunderbuss thinking. A man who commits arson must be punished for arson and not simply because he is a bad person. As Judge Robinson well put it in his excellent Dissenting Opinion in the Court below, “Civilized people have long since refrained from executing the wicked merely for the general good of the community.” He said further: “Even a knave ought not to be put to death unless he is guilty, by the law of the land of the offense for which the extreme penalty has been provided.”
Our criminal code does not impose the penalty of death for the crime of arson. Judges may not, by following a certain line of argument, arrive at the conclusion that arson leads into and becomes murder when a non-criminal death fortuitously coincides with some factor involved in the commission of arson. The constructive murder theme of the Act of 1860 is salubrious, wise and just, but one cannot take it farther than the law originally intended. It cannot be assumed that because a line is headed in a certain direction one can carry it an infinite distance and still stay within the original purpose of the drive. A person travelling south *534for a warmer climate will find that if lie travels too far lie will encounter a more frigid clime than the one lie experienced in the place he started from. Even the straightest line eventually curves on the earth’s surface.
I believe that some of our .decisions have gone too far in application of the constructive murder theme of the Act of 1860. The case of Commonwealth v. Doris, 287 Pa. 547, is in point. Five robbers participated in a bank robbery. While they were escaping, a gun battle with the police occurred. Doris was captured. While he was in the custody of the law and at a point removed from the shooting, one of his co-robbers (a certain Curry) shot and killed a policeman. Doris was charged with first degree murder on the theory that the. death occurred in the perpetration of a robbery in which he was a participant. He was convicted and executed. That Doris was a criminal and robber is evident, but it is difficult to follow the reasoning which justified his conviction of murder when the death which occurred at the hands of another criminal took place after Doris’s criminal venture had terminated. Logic which ignores facts ignores justice. One could well assume that Doris was just as bad a person as Curry, and might, had he had the opportunity, also have fired a bullet which could have killed the same or another policeman, but the law does not or should not operate on suppositions and on moral abstractions.
In the interest of systematic law, must there not be a limit beyond which the Law of 1860 cannot go? Suppose a bystander, because of a weak heart, died from excitement while witnessing the commission of a bank robbery, would the robbers in that event all be guilty of first degree murder under the Act of 1860? I would answer that question in the negative, but I am afraid that the argument which supports the constructive *535murder theme in the ease before us could be employed just as effectively and fatally in the hypothetical case indicated. What the law must avoid above all is absurdity because if law does not appeal to reason, it cannot command respect, and, without respect, courthouses are but brick and mortar, timber and stone.
I dissent from the Majority Opinion which holds that the facts as presented in the lower Court could support a first degree murder conviction against Bolish, but I concur in that part of the Opinion which awards a new trial for the reasons stated.