Court Opinion

ID: 9759245
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-29 00:10:06.852331+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T07:29:00.468111
License: Public Domain

LEIBSON, Justice,
concurring in part.
I concur in the portion of the Majority Opinion holding that under the indictment and proof in this ease conviction for both driving under the influence and wanton murder violates the double jeopardy principle. But, respectfully, I dissent from the two other major premises in the Majority Opinion. In my view:
1) The trial court’s instruction on the statutory presumption in KRS 189.520(3)(c) regarding intoxication prejudiced the appellant’s conviction on the wanton murder charge; and
2) The trial court should have directed a verdict of acquittal on the wanton murder charge, limiting the most serious offense for which the appellant could be convicted to involuntary manslaughter.
The Commonwealth concedes it was error to permit the jury to hear evidence of the statutory presumption of intoxication in a murder case. Respectfully, I dissent from the view that such evidence was harmless. The proof of its harm lies in the conviction for murder rather than the lesser offense of involuntary manslaughter which would conform much more closely to the proof in this case.
The trial court advised the jury as part of the proof that under the law in Kentucky “there is a presumption that is applied in cases where a person is accused of operating a car under the influence of intoxicants.” The trial court told the jury that if a defendant’s blood alcohol is more than .10 percent, then “it shall be presumed that the defendant was under the influence of intoxicating beverages.” [Emphasis added.] The trial court refused defense counsel’s request for an admonition limiting the jury’s consideration of this evidence solely *108to the driving under the influence charge. Because the jury was thus directed to consider the D.U.I. statutory presumption as evidence in the murder case, in closing argument the prosecutor told the jury “the defendant’s blood alcohol was three times drunk.” The prosecutor also stated the evidence “which jump[ed] this case from manslaughter in the second degree to murder” was appellant’s “extreme level of intoxication.” According to the prosecutor, “this would be a manslaughter in the second degree charge if [Walden] had a .10 blood alcohol or maybe .15, but when you are three times over the limit that ... says to the whole world, the whole community I don’t care whether somebody dies, I’m drunk and I’m driving.”
KRS 189.520 which creates these presumptions expressly restricts their application to cases tried under KRS 189.520(1) or 189A.010 “wherein the defendant is charged with having operated a vehicle while under the influence of intoxicating beverages.” The jury may well have concluded that these instructions from the judge removed the question of wanton murder versus involuntary manslaughter from serious debate. Surely, violating the statute’s limitation to D.U.I. cases is reversible error in present circumstances.
I turn now to the major difficulty in this case, whether the proof here is sufficient to sustain a conviction for wanton murder.
Where death is caused by wanton conduct the offense is second-degree manslaughter. The additional element that causes such a criminal homicide to be classified as murder is “circumstances manifesting extreme indifference to human life” (KRS 507.020) explained in the Commentary to the Penal Code as wantonness so extreme it should be assimilated to “intention. ” The Model Penal Code, § 210.2, from which our murder statute derives, explains:
“Insofar as subsection (l)(b) includes within the murder category cases of homicide caused by extreme recklessness, though without purpose to kill, it reflects both the common law and much pre-existing statutory treatment usually cast in terms of conduct evidencing a ‘depraved heart regardless of human life’ or similar words. Examples usually given include shooting into a crowd or into an occupied house or automobile, though they are not, of course, exhaustive.”
This case is the result of the erroneous path our Court started down in Hamilton v. Commonwealth, Ky., 560 S.W.2d 539 (1978), where we first affirmed a conviction for wanton murder based on drunken driving. Chief Justice Palmore said in his Dissent in Hamilton:
“There simply is a difference in culpability between committing an act that endangers people whose presence is known and an act that endangers people whose presence should be anticipated but in fact is not known.... In keeping with his [O.W. Holmes’] illustration of exploding a barrel of gunpowder in a crowded street, that would be the case in which the guilty party rode or drove heedlessly into a person or persons known to be in his path or so near to it that he must have realized he would hit somebody.” [Emphasis added]
These words mirror the Commentary to the offense described in the Model Penal Code from which our Kentucky Penal Code wanton murder offense derives verbatim. Following Palmore’s Dissent in Hamilton, and probably in reaction to it, the General Assembly amended the criminal homicide statutes to make clear that in appropriate circumstances operating a motor vehicle while intoxicated should be treated as murder. In 1984 both our wanton murder statute and our second-degree manslaughter statute were modified to make clear conduct in “the operation of a motor vehicle” is covered by these statutes. But these changes do not abolish the essential elements of, and the difference between, these two offenses. If it were the purpose of the General Assembly to treat drunken driving as murder whenever death results, it should have done so by changing the elements of the offense of wanton murder rather than simply amending the statute to specify that it could occur while operating a motor vehicle. It did not.
*109These statutory amendments in 1984 do not change the nature of the elements of the wanton murder offense; they do not eliminate the need to prove wanton conduct which is the culpable equivalent of intention, “a ‘depraved heart regardless of human life’.” Model Penal Code, § 210.2 supra.
A person does not, per se, have the required mens rea for wanton murder because he undertakes to drive a motor vehicle after he has been drinking alcohol passed the point where he is under the influence. He is then not fit to drive, but he does not fit the description of wanton murder absent further circumstances indicating a heedless disregard for victims he is consciously aware of. A drunk who drives heedlessly into people he sees standing on the road in front of him is guilty of the kind of conduct justifying a wanton murder conviction. There is no such evidence here.
The evidence showed the appellant was driving while highly intoxicated and at a high rate of speed. This is wanton conduct sufficient to justify a conviction for second-degree manslaughter, but does it equate to the degree of malice necessary to cross the murder threshold? If the evidence showed that the appellant undertook to drive an automobile when he was consciously aware of and callously indifferent to the fact he was so intoxicated he would cause death to other persons, wanton murder would be an appropriate charge. Here the evidence does not show that Walden got drunk knowing he would have to drive. On the contrary, the uncontradicted evidence is that he initially intended to sober up, to sleep it off, before driving home. Presumably, he got drunk and in that state decided to keep drinking. Drunkenness begets recklessness. But this does not mean that when a person gets drunk, and then makes a decision to drive, murder is the appropriate charge. The elements of second-degree manslaughter, not murder, fit the situation. The difference between the degree of wantonness necessary to commit murder and appropriate to second-degree manslaughter is as the Majority says, “primarily a question of fact for the jury,” but it is not exclusively so. At the threshold, the court must determine whether there is evidence from which the jury could infer culpability to a degree equivalent to intentional murder, a “depraved heart,” “an awareness of the creation of substantial homicidal risk.” Commentary, supra. Walden should be retried for criminal homicide subject only to the penalty for second-degree manslaughter. We significantly impair the credibility of our criminal justice system when we treat alike crimes with different degrees of criminal culpability. Second-degree manslaughter is a serious felony but it is not murder, and should not be treated as murder.
In the circumstances of this case the Commonwealth failed to prove “circumstances manifesting extreme indifference to human life.” There should be a retrial limited to second-degree manslaughter and lesser included offenses. Further, if thus tried, the reading of the statutory presumptions based on blood alcohol level would be improper because the statute specifies such a procedure only in D.U.I. cases. As evidence in a criminal homicide case it causes a substantial and undue prejudice.
COMBS, J., joins this concurring opinion.