Com. v. Bullock

• Decision Date: 27 December 2006
• Citation: 913 A.2d 207
• Parties: COMMONWEALTH of Pennsylvania, Appellee, v. Matthew BULLOCK, Appellant.
• Court: Pennsylvania Supreme Court

913 A.2d 207

COMMONWEALTH of Pennsylvania, Appellee, v. Matthew BULLOCK, Appellant.

Supreme Court of Pennsylvania.

Argued October 18, 2006.

Decided December 27, 2006.

COPYRIGHT MATERIAL OMITTED

Basil G. Russin, Esq., Public Defender's Office, Albert Joseph Flora, Jr., Esq., Wilkes-Barre, for Matthew Bullock.

David W. Lupas, Esq., Scott C. Gartley, Esq., Luzerne County District Attorney's Office, for Commonwealth of Pennsylvania.

BEFORE: CAPPY, C.J., and CASTILLE, NEWMAN, SAYLOR, EAKIN, BAER and BALDWIN, JJ.

OPINION

Justice SAYLOR.

This case primarily concerns the constitutionality of Pennsylvania's fetal homicide statute; it additionally entails a challenge to jury instructions given at Appellant's trial, where he was convicted of voluntary manslaughter of an unborn child.

I.

In the late 1990s, Pennsylvania's General Assembly enacted the Crimes Against the Unborn Child Act.¹ The Act added Chapter 26 to the Pennsylvania Crimes Code, which created several new offenses designed to protect unborn children from unlawful injury or death. Under the Act, an individual commits criminal homicide of an unborn child if he or she intentionally, knowingly, recklessly, or negligently causes the death of an unborn child, see 18 Pa.C.S. § 2603, a term that refers to the fetus at any stage of gestation. See 18 Pa.C.S. § 2602.² Accordingly, the Act establishes the crimes of first, second, and third degree murder of an unborn child, as well as voluntary manslaughter and aggravated assault of an unborn child. See 18 Pa.C.S. §§ 2604-2606. Its criminal provisions do not apply, however, to consensual abortion, doctors engaged in good faith medical practice, or pregnant women in regard to crimes against their own unborn children. See 18 Pa.C.S. § 2608(a). Of particular relevance to this appeal are the Act's specifications with regard to voluntary manslaughter:

(a) Offense defined.—A person who kills an unborn child without lawful justification commits voluntary manslaughter of an unborn child if at the time of the killing he is acting under a sudden and intense passion resulting from serious provocation by: (1) the mother of the unborn child whom the actor endeavors to kill, but he negligently or accidentally causes the death of the unborn child. . . .

* * * * * *

(c) Penalty.—The penalty for voluntary manslaughter of an unborn child shall be the same as the penalty for voluntary manslaughter.

18 Pa.C.S. § 2605.

II.

In late 2002, Appellant was living with his girlfriend, Lisa Hargrave, who was 22 to 23 weeks pregnant. According to Appellant's statement to police, on New Year's Eve 2002, he and Hargrave consumed alcohol and cocaine at a party and then returned to their apartment, where Hargrave continued to ingest cocaine. Appellant asked Hargrave to cease using drugs for the remainder of the night in view of her pregnancy. When Hargrave failed to comply, an argument ensued, during which Appellant "blacked out." When he awoke, he found himself on top of Hargrave strangling her so that she was almost unconscious. Because he feared Hargrave would call the police, he wrapped her feet and hands with masking tape and left the room. When he could hear her yelling and attempting to free herself, he returned, taped her mouth shut, and left the room again. After Hargrave continued to struggle to break free, Appellant returned to the bedroom once more and strangled her until she stopped breathing. He then dragged her body into the closet.

On January 6, 2003, Appellant arrived at the Wilkes-Barre Police Department and informed an officer that he had strangled his girlfriend to death. When the police arrived at the apartment, they found Hargrave's partially decomposed body in the closet with her hands, feet, and mouth bound with masking tape. Appellant was charged with the murder of Hargrave, see 18 Pa.C.S. § 2501(a), and, pursuant to the Act, with the criminal homicide of her unborn child as well. He filed a pre-trial motion challenging the constitutionality of the Act on, inter alia, due process and equal protection grounds; this motion was denied. The matter then proceeded to trial by jury in October 2003, at which Appellant did not testify.

At trial, the coroner stated that, after performing autopsies of Hargrave and her unborn child, he concluded that Hargrave's cause of death was "strangulation by history," which refers to the events immediately preceding the death, see N.T. October 20, 2003, at 142-44; this conclusion was apparently based, in part, upon the occurrences as related by Appellant in his statement to police. The coroner also found that the fetus's death was caused by "asphyxia due to the death of the mother by homicide." Id. at 148. In both cases, the coroner determined that the manner of death was homicide.

Before deliberations began, Appellant objected to the trial court's refusal to charge the jury on the mens rea elements "negligently" and "accidentally" found in the voluntary manslaughter provision of the Crimes Against the Unborn Child Act (see supra). The trial court overruled the objection, however, opting to allow the jury to use the "common and ordinary understanding" of the terms. Id. at 911. The jury found Appellant guilty-but-mentally-ill of third degree murder as to Hargrave, and guilty-but-mentally-ill of voluntary manslaughter of an unborn child. Appellant was sentenced to consecutive terms of imprisonment of fifteen to forty years for the murder of Hargrave, and five to twenty years for voluntary manslaughter of an unborn child. Appellant's post-sentence motions were denied.

After a unanimous panel of the Superior Court affirmed in a published opinion, see Commonwealth v. Bullock, 868 A.2d 516 (Pa.Super.2005), this Court granted discretionary review. See Commonwealth v. Bullock, 584 Pa. 705, 885 A.2d 40 (2005) (per curiam). Only the judgment of sentence for voluntary manslaughter of an unborn child is at issue in this appeal.

III.

We turn first to the question of the constitutionality of the Crimes Against the Unborn Child Act.³ It is foundational that all legislation duly enacted by the General Assembly enjoys a strong presumption of validity, and "will only be declared void if it violates the Constitution `clearly, palpably and plainly.'" City of Phila. v. Commonwealth, 575 Pa. 542, 573, 838 A.2d 566, 585 (2003) (quoting Commonwealth, Dep't of Transp. v. McCafferty, 563 Pa. 146, 155, 758 A.2d 1155, 1160 (2000)). The party challenging the statute's constitutionality "bears a very heavy burden to prove that it is unconstitutional," moreover, and all doubts on the question are resolved in favor of a finding of constitutionality. Payne v. Commonwealth, Dep't of Corr., 582 Pa. 375, 383, 871 A.2d 795, 800 (2005). Because this is an issue of law, our scope of review is plenary and our standard of review is de novo. See Commonwealth v. Cousin, 585 Pa. 287, 294, 888 A.2d 710, 714 (2005).

A. Vagueness

Appellant initially contends that the Act violates due process under the void-for-vagueness doctrine. He proffers that, absent a requirement that the fetus be viable outside the womb at the time of its death, the statute fails to provide fair warning of precisely what conduct is prohibited. Appellant reasons, in this regard, that, until a fetus is viable (in the sense that it could likely survive outside the womb),⁴ it cannot actually be alive and, hence, cannot suffer death. Such failure to include a viability component, according to Appellant, permits arbitrary application and enforcement of the statute because it is impossible for a person of ordinary intelligence to understand what "death" means when applied to a non-viable fetus. See Brief for Appellant at 13-14.

The void-for-vagueness doctrine "requires that a penal statute define the criminal offense with sufficient definiteness that ordinary people can understand what conduct is prohibited and in a manner that does not encourage arbitrary and discriminatory enforcement." Kolender v. Lawson, 461 U.S. 352, 357, 103 S.Ct. 1855, 1858, 75 L.Ed.2d 903 (1983); see Commonwealth v. Mayfield, 574 Pa. 460, 467, 832 A.2d 418, 422 (2003). Although criminal statutes should be strictly construed in favor of lenity where there is ambiguity, their words are, nonetheless, interpreted according to the "fair import of their terms." 18 Pa.C.S. § 105; see Commonwealth v. Booth, 564 Pa. 228, 234 & n. 5, 766 A.2d 843, 846 & n. 5 (2001).

Presently, the Act prescribes that it is unlawful to intentionally, knowingly, recklessly, or negligently cause the death of an unborn child, defined to include all stages of gestation from fertilization to live birth. This definition is straightforward. In the first place, the concept of a fetus or unborn child as a potential victim of violence is neither obscure nor difficult to grasp. See Booth, 564 Pa. at 241, 766 A.2d at 850 ("Today it is understood that a mother and her unborn child are separate and distinct entities, and that medicine is generally able to prove the corpus delicti of the homicide of an unborn child."). It is also clear that, by defining unborn child to include all stages of gestation, see supra note 2, the General Assembly intended to eliminate any viability requirement. Accord People v. Ford, 221 Ill.App.3d 354, 163 Ill.Dec. 766, 581 N.E.2d 1189, 1198 (1991) (reaching same conclusion with regard to a similarly-worded definition of unborn child). Moreover, as appellate courts in other jurisdictions have elaborated in construing similar feticide enactments, the statutory language does not purport to define the concept of personhood or establish when life as a human being begins and ends; rather, it imposes criminal liability for the destruction of a human embryo or fetus that is biologically alive. See, e.g., State v. Merrill, 450 N.W.2d 318, 324 (Minn.1990) ("People are free to differ or abstain on the profound philosophical and moral questions of whether an embryo is a human being, or on whether or at what...