Court Opinion

ID: 9686080
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-24 15:25:49.014175+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T18:18:14.402254
License: Public Domain

HARTEN, Judge
(concurring in part and dissenting in part).
I concur with the court’s conclusion that appellant’s confession was admissible as voluntarily made and that part of the opinion holding inapplicable the doctrine of transferred intent. Because I believe that appellant’s five convictions for assaulting Scott Staska’s wife, Julie Staska, and each of the *585four Staska children should stand independent of transferred intent3 and that the sentences pronounced by the district court are lawful, I respectfully dissent from the court’s reversal of appellant’s convictions for assaulting the Staska children. As to the court’s affirmance of appellant’s conviction for assaulting Julie Staska, I concur in the result.
Appellant was charged with six counts of second-degree assault pursuant to Minn.Stat. § 602.222, subd. 1 (1996). That statute forbids the assault of another with a dangerous weapon. In material part, the law defines assault as follows:
Minn.Stat. § 609.02 DEFINITIONS.
Subd. 10. Assault. “Assault” is
(1) An act done with intent to cause fear in another of immediate bodily harm or death;
(2) * * ⅜.
Under subdivision 1 of section 609.222, the state must show that appellant had such intent, which the factfinder may infer. See State v. Soine, 348 N.W.2d 824, 826 (Minn. App.1984) (the state need only introduce evidence from which it may be inferred that the accused had the requisite intent). Here the crimes were complete upon the discharge of the firearm. The split-second merger of the act (firing the rifle) and intent (to cause fear in another of immediate bodily harm or death) completes the crime. One need not look further to the consequences of the firing or the actual effect on the other person or persons who were the primary or secondary victims except insofar as the effect upon others may shed light upon the intent of the actor. See State v. Ott, 291 Minn. 72, 75, 189 N.W.2d 377, 379 (1971) (intent of actor, not effect on victim, is focal point, but ordinary effect on others “may naturally be taken into account to determine intent”). Thus in State v. Abeyta, 328 N.W.2d 443, 444 (Minn.1983), the appellant fired a 12-gauge shotgun in the middle of the night at a couple’s house and later claimed that he did so only to startle, not frighten, the couple within. The supreme court saw no merit in appellant’s contention that “the state failed to establish that he intended by his act of shooting the gun at the house to put the residents in fear of immediate bodily harm or death.” Id. at 445.
In the instant case, the following were among the findings of fact made by the district court:
4. * * * [Appellant] obtained a .22 caliber, semi-automatic rifle ⅜ * *.
* * * *
6. [Appellant] and the others subsequently agreed to shoot at the home of the high school principal, Mr. Scott Staska.
* * * *
8. [Appellant] proceeded to * * * pick up the rifle, aim it at the left side of the Staska home, and discharge the rifle at the Staska home in a rapid-fire manner, expending seven shots. * * * Nathan Bontjes then quickly drove the vehicle away from the Staska home.
9. The bullet holes were located between two bedrooms on the left side of the home. Three of the bullets went through the outside wall and lodged in the interior of the home, narrowly missing one of the four Staska children.
10. At the time of the shooting, Scott Staska and his wife, Julie Staska, and their four children were sleeping in their respective bedrooms in the vicinity of where the bullets were fired at the home.
⅜ * * *
15. * * * [Appellant’s] confession to law enforcement authorities provides that he was going to “just shoot somebody or something.” ⅜ * * [T]he group decided to shoot at the home of the principal of the high school, Scott Staska. [Appellant] and the others drove to the Staska home in a deliberate manner. [Appellant] decided not to shoot at the large picture window, which generally would be where the living room is located, and, instead decided to shoot at the left side of the house, which *586might logically be the location of other rooms, including bedrooms in which the family would be sleeping at that time of night [about 10:45 p.m.].
16. * * * [B]y his act of shooting seven bullets into the home of Scott Staska, [appellant] intended to cause Mr. Staska fear of immediate bodily harm or death.
⅜ ⅜ ⅜ ⅜
19. [Appellant] fired seven bullets into the Staska home when the possibility existed that the home contained family members other than Scott Staska [the primary victim]. It was also a highly probable consequence that others in the home would be victims of [appellant’s] actions. * * * In this ease, physical injury is not an element of the crime of Assault in the Second Degree. Accordingly, no physical injury is necessary for intent to transfer to the other five family members. Thus, [appellant’s] intent to assault Scott Staska with a dangerous weapon transfers to the other five family members of the Staska family.
(Emphasis added). It is apparent that the district court, albeit attempting to apply the law of transferred intent, found facts sufficient to support application of the law of concurrent intent, that is, intent to contemporaneously cause fear not only in the primary victim, but also in secondary victims present in the zone of harm (here the Staska home) when appellant rapidly fired seven shots into the home. The difference between transferred intent and concurrent intent is set forth by the Maryland Court of Appeals in Ford, 625 A.2d at 1000-01:
In transferred intent, the intended harm does not occur to the intended victim, but occurs instead to a second unintended victim. The actual result is an unintended, unanticipated consequence of intended harm. ⅜ ⅜ ‡ The intent is concurrent, on the other hand, when the nature and scope of the attack, while directed at a primary victim, are such that we can conclude the perpetrator intended to insure harm to the primary victim by harming everyone in that victim’s vicinity. * * * Where the means employed to commit the crime against a primary victim create a zone of harm around that victim, the factfinder can reasonably infer that the defendant intended that harm to all who are in the anticipated zone.4
(Emphasis added). The harm in the instant case, of course, is physical presence in the zone of harm when appellant undertook his senseless firing. It is irrelevant to a finding of the commission of second-degree assault that the four Staska children were sleeping when appellant fired into the home. One cannot deny that the children were in the zone of harm; bullets pierced the wall inches over the head of one of the sleeping Staska boys. Appellant sprayed seven bullets from a semi-automatic rifle gangland style into Staska’s home, allegedly not to harm anyone, but only to “scare” Scott Staska. Never mind that Staska’s spouse and four children were in the same vicinity of the house — -and that appellant had never met Scott Staska, but only knew of him as the high school principal. Unpersuaded, and relying on the opinion of this court in Livingston, the district court found appellant guilty of assaulting Staska himself, and under the transferred intent doctrine, of assaulting Staska’s family. The district court did not need the transferred intent doctrine. Given the nature and scope of this attack, if Scott Staska was the primary victim, the presence of his wife and children who were with him in the zone of harm supports an inference that they were secondary victims. There being criminal intent as to. Staska, it was concurrent criminal intent affecting all of those who shared with him the zone of harm. That was the sense of the district court’s findings of fact and that is the sense in which we should review the district court’s application of law to the facts it found.
Given my position in dissent, I have no quarrel with court’s result in upholding appellant’s conviction with regard to Julie Stas-ka. The means the court uses to effect that result, however, exacerbates the confused *587state of Minnesota law on transferred intent. The court first defines “classic” transferred intent as occurring “when a person, other than the defendant’s intended victim, suffers the actual harm intended for, but not inflicted, on, the intended victim.” (Emphasis added). That definition is solid. But then citing Merrill and Livingston, the court defeats the “classic” definition by using a hybrid transferred intent that applies also “when the intended victim also actually suffered the intended harm.” In my opinion, the court’s extended application is just plain wrong. I know of no accepted definition of transferred intent other than the “classic” definition. Thus, while reversing the trial court for “stretching” transferred intent to cover the Staska children, the court itself stretches’the doctrine to cover Julie Staska.
Finally, citing agreement of counsel, the court pays little heed to obvious resentencing problems occasioned by its reversal of the convictions for assaulting the four Staska children. Appellant was charged with committing six counts of assault, one count per victim. Appellant’s two consecutive executed prison sentences were imposed for the his assaults upon the two Staska boys. The assaults of parents Scott and Julie Staska and the two Staska girls each resulted in stays of execution of sentence. The court has reversed the convictions involving the assaults of all four of the children, boys and girls, thereby automatically voiding the executed sentences for the assaults of the boys.
Nonetheless, the court remands for “open sentencing” on the affirmed convictions for the assaults of Scott and Julie Staska. Yet appellant has already been sentenced for the latter assaults, receiving stays of execution on both, which sentences still stand, but depending upon what the court means by “open sentencing,” apparently are now subject to modification on remand. The court cites no authority for this beyond agreement of counsel.

. For a discussion of the development and parameters of the transferred intent doctrine, see Judge Moylan's opinion in Harvey v. State, 111 Md.App. 401, 681 A.2d 628 (1996), and the Maryland Court of Appeals decision in Ford v. State, 330 Md. 682, 625 A.2d 984 (1993). Minnesota caselaw lacks a comprehensive clarification of the doctrine. Our opinion in State v. Livingston, 420 N.W.2d 223 (Minn.App. 1988), on which the district court relied, is not helpful.

. The analysis applied in Ford assumes the perpetrator’s awareness of the presence of secondary victims. The rule stated, however, accommodates the factfinder’s inference of intent to harm those in the zone of harm, which is precisely what the district court attempted to do here through application of the transferred intent doctrine.