Miller v. Commonwealth

• Decision Date: 31 March 2015
• Docket Number: Record No. 0340–14–4.
• Citation: 769 S.E.2d 706,64 Va.App. 527
• Court: Virginia Court of Appeals
• Parties: Tiffany Stevens MILLER v. COMMONWEALTH of Virginia.

64 Va.App. 527

769 S.E.2d 706

Tiffany Stevens MILLER

v.COMMONWEALTH of Virginia.

Record No. 0340–14–4.

Court of Appeals of Virginia, Richmond.

March 31, 2015.

Bryan T. Kennedy, Assistant Public Defender (Office of the Public Defender, on brief), for appellant.

Aaron J. Campbell, Assistant Attorney General (Mark R. Herring, Attorney General, on brief), for appellee.

Present: HUMPHREYS, PETTY and DECKER, JJ.

Opinion

DECKER, Judge.

Tiffany Stevens Miller appeals her conviction for contributing to the delinquency of a minor, in violation of Code § 18.2–371. Specifically, she suggests that the evidence was insufficient to support her conviction because the Commonwealth failed to prove: (1) she left her child without parental care or guardianship, (2) her actions constituted an unreasonable absence from the child, and (3) her actions were willful. Miller also argues that the trial court erred when it denied her proposed jury instruction defining parental care for purposes of the statute. The Court holds that the evidence was sufficient to support the conviction and that the trial court did not err by denying the proposed jury instruction. Consequently, we affirm the judgment of the trial court.

I. BACKGROUND¹

On May 1, 2013, the appellant went to a grocery store in Fairfax County. She had her young child and two dogs with her in her vehicle. The child, who appeared to be between one and two years old, was in a car seat in the back seat. The appellant “double parked” the car in the fire lane in front of the store. The cement was clearly marked with yellow paint to indicate that no parking was allowed in that location. The appellant left the car's engine running and went inside the store while the child remained asleep in the car seat. All of the car's windows were open, including the one closest to the child.

Once inside the store, at some point in time, the appellant approached employee Raul Campaverde, whom the appellant did not know. She asked Campaverde if he could “watch her car outside for about five minutes.” She pointed to her car but Campaverde could not see it. He went outside to the car and saw a child asleep in the back seat. The appellant had not told him that a child was inside the car. Campaverde stayed with the car for “longer than 30 minutes” but had to return to the store to resume his duties. Before doing so, he found Lisa Slawson, a co-worker who had just begun an hour-long assignment in the parking lot. Slawson agreed to “watch the child as much as she could” but clarified with Campaverde that she “could not stand there and do nothing; she had to move carts and go inside frequently.” Slawson, like Campaverde, did not know the appellant.

After about five to ten minutes of watching the car, Slawson saw the appellant exit the store. The appellant went to the car, took what appeared to be the car keys, told Slawson she would be back in a few more minutes, and went back inside. According to Slawson, the appellant did not “tend to the child” or say anything else to her. After about twenty to thirty minutes, Slawson went into the store to attend to her assigned responsibilities. She was not aware of anyone else watching the vehicle. Slawson told her managers about the situation and explained that she was conflicted between watching the car and doing her job.

Larry Baxley, a store manager, also saw the appellant's car parked in the fire lane with the unattended child inside. Baxley spoke with Campaverde, who “told him about the car.” Baxley “looked [at] the car on several occasions after going into the store” but never saw anyone with the vehicle or watching it. He wrote down the license plate number and, after about twenty minutes of observing the unattended car, notified the police.

Campaverde estimated that the car was gone between forty-five minutes to an hour after he first encountered the appellant. Slawson noticed that the vehicle was parked in front of the store just before her hour-long assignment began and was still there when the assignment ended.

When Officer Kannegisser of the Fairfax County Police Department arrived at the store, the car was gone. He went to the appellant's home to investigate. She admitted that the unattended car belonged to her and that her child was inside the vehicle while it was parked in front of the store. She told the officer that she left the engine running and “employees of the store had agreed to watch the child for her.” However, she did not know the names of the employees.

The jury convicted the appellant of contributing to the delinquency of a minor, in violation of Code § 18.2–371. Consistent with the recommendation of the jury, the trial court imposed a fine of $800.

II. ANALYSIS

A. Sufficiency of the Evidence

The appellant contends that the trial court erred by finding the evidence sufficient to convict her of contributing to the delinquency of a minor. She asserts three alleged deficiencies, arguing that the Commonwealth failed to prove that: (1) she left her child without parental care or guardianship, (2) her actions constituted an unreasonable absence from her child, and (3) her actions were willful.

This Court applies a well-established standard when reviewing the sufficiency of the evidence to support a criminal conviction. “[W]e consider the record ‘in the light most favorable to the Commonwealth, giving it all reasonable inferences fairly deducible’ ” from that record. DeAmicis v. Commonwealth, 31 Va.App. 437, 440, 524 S.E.2d 151, 152 (2000) (en banc ) (quoting Watkins v. Commonwealth, 26 Va.App. 335, 348, 494 S.E.2d 859, 866 (1998) ) (internal quotation marks omitted). In doing so, the Court discards “ ‘the evidence of the accused in conflict with that of the Commonwealth, and regard[s] as true all the credible evidence favorable to the Commonwealth.’ ” Id. (quoting Watkins, 26 Va.App. at 348, 494 S.E.2d at 866 ). The judgment of the jury, confirmed by the trial court, “finding guilt beyond a reasonable doubt, will not be set aside unless plainly wrong or unsupported by the evidence.” Id.; see Code § 8.01–680.

The law is also clear that determining the credibility of the witnesses and the weight afforded the testimony of those witnesses are matters left to the trier of fact, who has the ability to hear and see them as they testify. Commonwealth v. Taylor, 256 Va. 514, 518, 506 S.E.2d 312, 314 (1998). Finally, if the evidence is sufficient to support the conviction, the reviewing appellate court will not “substitute its own judgment for that of the trier of fact, even if its opinion might differ from the conclusions reached by the [fact finder].” Jordan v. Commonwealth, 286 Va. 153, 156–57, 747 S.E.2d 799, 800 (2013).

The code section prohibiting the offense of contributing to the delinquency of a minor provides, in pertinent part, that any person, including the parent of the child, who “willfully contributes to, encourages, or causes any act, omission, or condition that renders [the] child ... abused or neglected as defined in § 16.1–228... is guilty of a Class 1 misdemeanor.” Code § 18.2–371(i). Here, the Commonwealth proceeded under the theory that the abuse or neglect fell within the definition provided in Code § 16.1–228(5). Based on that definition, an abused or neglected child, for purposes of this case, is any child “[w]ho is without parental care or guardianship caused by the unreasonable absence ... of the child's parent, guardian, legal custodian, or other person standing in loco parentis.” Code § 16.1–228(5).

To the extent our analysis of the sufficiency of the evidence requires us to examine the statutory language, we review issues of statutory construction de novo on appeal. See, e.g., Sarafin v. Commonwealth, 288 Va. ––––, ––––, 764 S.E.2d 71, 74 (2014).

This same de novo standard of review applies to determining the proper definition of a particular word in a statute. See Blake v. Commonwealth, 288 Va. ––––, ––––, 764 S.E.2d 105, 107 (2014).

We apply these well-established legal principles to our review of this case.

1. Parental Care or Guardianship

The appellant argues that the Commonwealth failed to prove that she left her child “without parental care or guardianship.” We hold that the evidence was sufficient to support the jury's finding regarding this element of the offense.

Code §§ 18.2–371 and 16.1–228, the applicable sections, do not define parental care or guardianship. Consequently, consistent with the law relating to interpretation of statutes, plain, ordinary words are to be given their common, everyday meaning. See, e.g., Thomas v. Commonwealth, 59 Va.App. 496, 500, 720 S.E.2d 157, 159–60 (2012). There can be no dispute that the mother left her toddler for about an hour. Parental care, a term used in the statute, is quite simply the care provided by a parent to his or her child. When the appellant chose to go inside the store and leave her young child in the car, either alone or under the intermittent monitoring of a stranger, she left him without parental care. See Wood v. Commonwealth, 57 Va.App. 286, 300–01, 701 S.E.2d 810, 817 (2010) (recognizing that the level of care needed depends upon the degree of vulnerability of the child and that “mature judgment” is “necessary for parents of small children”).

The record also supports a finding that the appellant left her child without a guardian. The term guardian, given its common meaning, implies some degree of legal or formal responsibility for a child. See In re O'Neil, 18 Va.App. 674, 678–79, 446 S.E.2d 475, 478 (1994) (“A guardian is ‘one who legally has responsibility for the care and management of the person, or the estate, or both, of a child during its minority.’ ” (quoting Black's Law Dictionary 635 (5th ed.1979))); Black's Law Dictionary 822 (10th ed.2014) (defining “guardian” as “[s]omeone who has the legal authority and duty to care for another's person or property, esp. because of the other's infancy, incapacity, or disability”). The record is devoid of any evidence of such an...