Com. v. Peruzzi

• Decision Date: 10 March 1983
• Citation: 15 Mass.App.Ct. 437,446 N.E.2d 117
• Parties: COMMONWEALTH v. Kenneth L. PERUZZI.
• Court: Appeals Court of Massachusetts

Page 117

446 N.E.2d 117

15 Mass.App.Ct. 437

COMMONWEALTH v. Kenneth L. PERUZZI.

Appeals Court of Massachusetts Suffolk.

Argued Jan. 10, 1983.

Decided March 10, 1983.

John E. Conwell, Boston, for defendant.

Muriel Ann Finnegan, Asst. Dist. Atty., for the Commonwealth.

Before GREANEY, KAPLAN and DREBEN, JJ.

GREANEY, Justice.

The defendant has appealed from his conviction by a jury on an indictment under G.L. c. 266, § 127, ¹ which alleged that on May 28, 1980, the defendant "did wilfully and maliciously injur[e] and destroy certain personal property, to wit: a van, the property of [the] Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority, ... the value of the property so injured and destroyed being in excess of one hundred dollars." The only question raised by the appeal is whether the judge erred in his instructions to the jury on the meaning of word "malicious" in the section of G.L. c. 266, § 127, bracketed as in note 1, supra.

The evidence presented by the Commonwealth may be summarized as follows. At approximately 3:00 A.M. on May 29, 1980, Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority (MBTA) employee James Flynn was sitting in a rear seat of an MBTA walk-in step van parked near a subway entrance in East Boston. Two other MBTA employees who had accompanied him to the job site in the van had entered the subway to inspect a repair job. As Flynn waited for them in the back of the van, a three to four foot length of pipe was suddenly thrust through the front passenger window, breaking it. Flynn jumped up, looked through the window and observed the defendant holding the pipe, which was then thrust through the window a second time. Flynn grabbed the pipe and threw it to the ground through the open door of the van. At the same time, he observed that a second man had raised the hood of the van and was tampering with something in the engine compartment. Flynn seized a pick handle from inside the van, exited and confronted the two men. Threatening words were directed at Flynn. He immediately reentered the van and drove away with the van's hood still raised. He soon discovered that the van's service brakes were completely inoperable. Using the parking brake, Flynn carefully brought the van back to the scene of the incident to await the return of his two fellow employees. The defendant and the other man had by then left. When the other workers returned, Flynn told them what had happened. The three men then walked to a police station. The defendant was spotted by Flynn from a patrol car approximately forty-five minutes later standing on a street corner one block away. The police officers who were with Flynn when he made the identification immediately arrested the defendant. There was testimony that the brake malfunction was caused by damage to brake components under the van's hood and that the total cost of repairing the brakes and the broken window was $205. The defendant rested without presenting any evidence.

The judge instructed the jury on the element of malice as follows: "Malicious refers to state of mind or cruelty, hostility or revenge .... Malice or malicious includes not only those motives which may spring from anger, hatred or revenge in a person, but from any other unlawful purpose or unjustifiable motive that such a person may harbor. The word malice includes any intention to inflict injury without legal justification." At the close of the charge, counsel for the defendant moved that the jury be reinstructed with reference to the malice requirement to the effect that they must acquit the defendant unless they found that he damaged the van "in a sense of hostility, revenge, or cruelty." ² This instruction was refused by the judge and an objection taken to his ruling. The defendant argues that the instructions misstated the element of malice. There is no contention by the Commonwealth that the defendant has failed to preserve the issue for review. We are also satisfied that the issue was properly saved. See Commonwealth v. Benders, 361 Mass. 704, 707-709, 282 N.E.2d 405 (1972).

1. The development of the concept of malice in malicious damage cases may be traced to Commonwealth v. Walden, 3 Cush. 558 (1849), where the defendant was indicted under a statute prohibiting the wilful and malicious destruction or injury of the personal property of another. There the court expressly disapproved a jury instruction which "defined the word 'maliciously,' ... to mean 'the wilfully doing of any act prohibited by law, and for which the defendant had no lawful excuse; and that moral turpitude of mind was not necessary to be shown.' " Id. at 559. This construction of the statute, it was thought, failed to distinguish malice from wilfulness, making possible an unwarranted imposition of criminal liability for minor acts of wilful trespass involving trifling injury. Id. at 560. Citing Blackstone, the court held that "[t]he jury should ... have been instructed, that, to authorize them to find the defendant guilty, they must be satisfied, that the injury was done either out of a spirit of wanton cruelty or wicked revenge .... [W]e have no doubt that such is the true definition of the crime." Id. at 561. See 4 Blackstone, Commentaries *243.

The concept of "hostility" was added to the qualifying states of mind of "cruelty" or "revenge" to define further the element of malice by Commonwealth v. Williams, 110 Mass. 401 (1872), where the court dealt with a statute punishing the wilful or malicious injury or destruction of the building of another. Relying upon the Walden case, the court in Williams held that "the jury must be satisfied that the injury was done out of a spirit of cruelty, hostility or revenge. This element must exist in all those injuries to real or personal property done wilfully and maliciously which are enumerated and made criminal in the several statutes .... The act, although intentional and unlawful, is nothing more than a civil injury, unless accompanied with that special malice which the words 'wilful and malicious' imply." Id. at 402-403.

In dicta appearing in Commonwealth v. Goodwin, 122 Mass. 19 (1877), a case of attempted extortion, the court restated the holding of the Walden decision, expressly noting that "the malice required to support the prosecution [of a malicious damage case] must contain the additional element of cruelty or of hostility or revenge towards the person. The wilful doing of an unlawful act without excuse, when applied, as a definition of malice, to injuries to property alone, would make many more trespasses punishable criminally, against the plain intention of these statutes. It is the special depravity or special hostility towards the owner which makes a crime of that which would otherwise be a mere trespass to property." 122 Mass. at 35.

These cases dealt with statutes which typically defined the proscribed acts of mischief strictly in terms of wilful and malicious (or wilful or malicious) destruction of or injury to the property of another. See, e.g., Rev.Sts. 1836, c. 126, § 39; St.1862, c. 160. Unlike G.L. c. 266, § 127, which was enacted in substantially its present form in 1902, the earlier statutes contained no provision for an offense of "wanton" injury or destruction. ³ The Walden court, in the context of one of the earlier statutes, held that a "spirit of wanton cruelty" (3 Cush. at 561) would imply the malice requisite to a conviction. The Legislature has since seen fit, however, to enact the present statute, which differentiates sharply between wilful and malicious damage on the one hand and wanton damage on the other. See the portions of the statute bracketed as and in note 1, supra. In view of the Legislature's intervening creation of this distinction, the language in Walden which appears to equate "wanton cruelty" with malice might now be subject to criticism.

In Commonwealth v. Hosman, 257 Mass. 379, 154 N.E. 76 (1926), the court reviewed convictions of being accessories to the malicious destruction of two automobiles on an indictment framed with reference to the modern statute. The defendants' agent, engaged in delivering bootleg liquor, had allegedly been instructed by the defendants not to stop for police and to "crash through them" if necessary. The police attempted to stop the agent by blocking his path with two automobiles, and the agent, faithful to orders, attempted to run the blockade, damaging the vehicles extensively. The Supreme Judicial Court upheld the trial judge's instruction to the jury that "the Commonwealth must prove something more than a deliberate intent to do a wrong; that they must be satisfied that the act was something more than a deliberate act; 'it must have been done through a sense of hostility or of ill will or of wanton cruelty.' " Id. at 384, 154 N.E. 76. The potential in these instructions for blurring the statutory distinction between wilful and malicious destruction and wanton destruction was apparently not made an issue on appeal. This circumstance may at least partially explain the decision's citation of Commonwealth v. Byard, 200 Mass. 175, 86 N.E. 285 (1908), in its discussion of malice, although the Byard case dealt only with wanton, not malicious, conduct. See id. at 177. Despite the references to "wanton cruelty" and the Byard decision, it is clear that the Hosman court viewed the evidence of the defendants' orders to their agent as probative of hostility and ill will in the sense that those terms were used in the older cases. Citing both the Goodwin and Williams decisions, the court held that the defendants' "spirit of hostility and ill will against the property and person of anyone, whoever he was, if he stood in the way, or barred the progress of [the agent], was wilful and malicious." ⁴ Commonwealth v. Hosman, 257 Mass. at 385, 154 N.E. 76. We read the Hosman decision as reaffirming the holdings in the earlier cases that "something more than a deliberate intent to do a wrong" must be shown to establish...