Laines v. State, 3

• Decision Date: 15 November 1995
• Docket Number: 9493,3
• Parties: Clifford LAINES, Appellant, v. The STATE of Florida, Appellee. CASE NO. 94-93.
• Court: Florida District Court of Appeals

Clifford LAINES, Appellant, v. The STATE of Florida, Appellee.

CASE NO. 94-93.

District Court of Appeal of Florida Third District.

Nov. 15, 1995.

An appeal from the Circuit Court of Dade County, Joseph P. Farina, Judge.

Bennett H. Brummer, Public Defender, and Julie M. Levitt, Special Assistant Public Defender, for appellant.

Robert A. Butterworth, Attorney General, and Elliot B. Kula, Assistant Attorney General, for appellee.

Before HUBBART and BASKIN and GREEN, JJ.

HUBBART, Judge.

The state has filed a motion for rehearing contending that an aggravated battery can, in fact, be parsed out of the defendant's single homicidal assault inflicted on the victim below. The state reasons that the victim suffered two distinct types of injuries in this case: trauma to the head inflicted by a series of physical blows with a pistol, and two gunshot wounds inflicted by the same pistol. Because the head injuries were admittedly not in themselves sufficient to cause death, it is urged that the head blows constitute a single composite aggravated battery.

The fatal flaw in this reasoning, however, is that the subject head blows did, in fact, contribute to the victim's death, along with the gunshot wounds, and were inexorably bound up in a single homicidal assault committed at precisely the same time and place; as previously stated, the associate medical examiner testified below that the victim died due to gunshot wounds "associated with the blunt injury he suffered to the head." True, the head blows were not the "but for" cause of the victim's death, but clearly such blows medically contributed to, and were a "substantial factor" in bringing about, such death; accordingly, both the head blows and the gun shot wounds together were the cause-in-fact of the victim's death. See Velazquez v. State, 561 So.2d 347, 350-51 (Fla. 3d DCA), rev. denied, 570 So.2d 1306 (Fla.1990).

Moreover, to accept the state's reasoning would mean that a separate aggravated battery was committed for every head blow inflicted on the victim--not one composite aggravated battery for the entire series of head blows, as the state urges. Necessarily, this would mean that in every criminal homicide case involving multiple gun shots wounds or physical blows inflicted on the victim in a single criminal incident, as here, each shot or blow which failed the "but for" test could be prosecuted as an aggravated battery or attempted murder--although, as here, every one of the shots and blows...