People v. Bagwell
| Decision Date | 21 April 2022 |
| Docket Number | Court of Appeals No. 19CA2398 |
| Citation | 514 P.3d 953,2022 COA 44 |
| Parties | The PEOPLE of the State of Colorado, Plaintiff-Appellee, v. Bruce E. BAGWELL, Defendant-Appellant. |
| Court | Colorado Court of Appeals |
Philip J. Weiser, Attorney General, Elizabeth Rohrbough, Senior Assistant Attorney General, Denver, Colorado, for Plaintiff-Appellee
Megan A. Ring, Colorado State Public Defender, Katherine Brien, Deputy State Public Defender, Denver, Colorado, for Defendant-Appellant
Opinion by JUDGE KUHN
¶ 1 Defendant, Bruce E. Bagwell, appeals his conviction of intentional first degree murder. We affirm.
¶ 2 Bagwell was convicted for killing his terminally ill wife of thirty-six years. Shortly after Bagwell's wife was diagnosed with metastatic lung cancer
, her health and quality of life began to deteriorate. Weeks before Bagwell fatally shot her, his wife experienced declining cognitive function, lapses in consciousness, and difficulty walking because the cancer had spread to her brain. She lost approximately forty pounds and needed a walker or wheelchair to move around their apartment. Her doctor estimated she had mere months or weeks to live.
¶ 3 Hospice care was ordered; a hospice nurse began weekly visits to the Bagwells’ apartment to attend to Bagwell's wife and bring her medication for pain management. Bagwell's wife, though, elected not to take these medications or undergo the painful cancer
treatments that might have prolonged her life.
¶ 4 After she allegedly asked Bagwell to end her life each day for five days straight, he shot her in the apartment they shared — twice in her head and once in her chest.
¶ 5 Shortly before Bagwell fatally shot his wife, he told her sister he believed his wife would be dead in approximately two weeks. In the hour after the shooting, Bagwell admitted to his wife's father, his wife's sister, and the arresting officers that he shot his wife because she asked him to do so to end her suffering. He told law enforcement that his wife had begged him to shoot her each of the preceding five days, and he explained that it was a "mercy killing." In a videotaped interrogation, Bagwell again admitted to two detectives that he had killed his wife.
¶ 6 Bagwell was charged with first degree murder, a class 1 felony under section 18-3-102(1)(a), (3), C.R.S. 2021. Before trial, he moved to suppress his statements to the detectives and endorsed an affirmative defense of consent under section 18-1-505, C.R.S. 2021. The trial court denied Bagwell's motion to suppress and precluded him from asserting his wife's alleged consent to be killed as a defense. The trial court reasoned that when the General Assembly intended to create an affirmative defense to homicide, it did so explicitly.
¶ 7 Bagwell was convicted and sentenced to life imprisonment. He challenges both the consent and suppression rulings on appeal.
¶ 8 Section 18-1-505 creates an affirmative defense for criminal defendants under certain circumstances in which the victim consents to the defendant inflicting the victim's injury. Bagwell contends the trial court erred by denying him this defense to the first degree murder charge. We conclude that section 18-1-505 does not permit this defense when the victim consents to the defendant causing the victim's death.
¶ 10 We analyze whether consent can constitute a defense to a crime in the context of the particular offense and the defendant's particular conduct. See Hotsenpiller , ¶ 22 (). Bagwell committed first degree murder if, "[a]fter deliberation and with the intent to cause the death of a person other than himself, he cause[d] the death of that person." § 18-3-102(1)(a).
¶ 11 Whether section 18-1-505 permits a defense of consent to first degree murder is a question of statutory interpretation that we review de novo. See People v. Jones , 2020 CO 45, ¶ 54, 464 P.3d 735. If the defense is available, we also review de novo whether Bagwell presented sufficient evidence to be entitled to the jury's consideration of it. People v. DeGreat , 2018 CO 83, ¶ 16, 428 P.3d 541.
¶ 12 "It is the General Assembly's prerogative to define crimes and prescribe punishments ...." People v. Trujillo , 631 P.2d 146, 148 (Colo. 1981). Our primary goal in statutory interpretation is to discern the legislature's intent and to "effectuate the purpose of the legislative scheme[,] ... read[ing] that scheme as a whole [and] giving consistent, harmonious, and sensible effect to all of its parts." McCoy v. People , 2019 CO 44, ¶¶ 37-38, 442 P.3d 379.
¶ 13 We first look to the language of the statute, reading it as a whole and giving its words and phrases their common meanings. Jones , ¶ 54. If the plain meaning of the statute is clear, we apply it as written. Id. "If, however, the language is ambiguous, meaning it is silent or susceptible to more than one reasonable interpretation, we may use extrinsic aids of construction, ‘such as the consequences of a given construction, the end to be achieved by the statute, and the statute's legislative history.’ " Id. at ¶ 55 (quoting McCoy , ¶ 38 ).
¶ 14 Bagwell contends that section 18-1-505 permits the defense of consent to first degree murder when a terminally ill victim urges a loved one to put an end to her painful, inevitable decline. We disagree.
¶ 15 Bagwell urges that, in this situation, section 18-1-505(1) makes the defense available because the terminally ill victim's consent to dying — and the loved one's desire to fulfill that wish — "precludes the infliction of the harm or evil sought to be prevented by" the prohibition of murder. This prohibition, according to Bagwell, seeks to prevent malicious killings, not mercy killings such as the one that allegedly occurred here. In other words, Bagwell argues that the prohibition of murder seeks to prevent unwanted as opposed to wanted deaths.
¶ 16 Even if we assume, however, that subsection (1) makes the defense available to Bagwell,1 we conclude that subsection (2) precludes it. Under any reasonable interpretation of subsection (2), the injuries causing his wife's death are "bodily injur[ies] ... [that are] ... serious."
¶ 17 "When conduct is charged to constitute an offense because it causes or threatens bodily injury, consent to that conduct or to the infliction of that injury is a defense only if the bodily injury consented to or threatened by the conduct consented to is not serious ...." § 18-1-505(2). Whether the injuries to which Bagwell's wife consented fall under this provision turns on the General Assembly's intent in using the phrase "bodily injury ... [that] is not serious."
¶ 18 The criminal code defines "bodily injury" as "physical pain, illness, or any impairment of physical or mental condition." § 18-1-901(1), (3)(c), C.R.S. 2021. It does not, however, define "serious" by itself or the phrase "bodily injury ... [that] is not serious."2
¶ 19 Colorado's consent defense is largely based on the Model Penal Code (MPC), Hotsenpiller , ¶ 22 n.5, and subsection (2) enacted section 2.11 of the MPC verbatim. Because no Colorado appellate cases have interpreted subsection (2), we refer to the MPC and its commentary for guidance on the meaning of this portion of the consent statute. See Hotsenpiller , ¶ 22 n.5.
¶ 20 The MPC explains that, for offenses that cause or threaten bodily injury, consent will have defensive significance only if, as relevant here, "the injury is not serious ." Model Penal Code § 2.11 Explanatory Note (Am. L. Inst., Official Draft and Revised Comments 1985) (emphasis added). Indeed, the commentary observes that consent is generally accepted as a defense only when "no injury is caused or the injury is slight." Id. at note 2 on Bodily Injury. Notably, the drafters of the MPC explained that homicide has universally been thought to be an offense "as to which consent does not operate to prevent consummation of the crime." Id. at note 1 on General Principles.
¶ 21 Neither the consent statute nor the MPC defines when an injury is "serious," so we may refer to dictionary definitions to determine the plain and ordinary meaning of this term. See People v. Serra , 2015 COA 130, ¶ 52, 361 P.3d 1122. The dictionary defines "serious" to include "having important or dangerous consequences." Merriam-Webster Dictionary, https://perma.cc/SXQ4-ASMV.
¶ 22 We conclude the plain meaning of section 18-1-505 reveals the General Assembly's intent to adopt the consent defense as it was described by the MPC commentary. In other words, the defense is available under subsection (2) only when the victim consents to a minor injury. An injury that causes a victim's death is necessarily "serious" — and thus not minor — because it involves a permanent and dangerous impairment of the victim's physical condition. The consent defense is not available, then, when a defendant...
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