People v. Haynie

• Decision Date: 05 June 2020
• Docket Number: COA: 340377,SC: 159619
• Citation: 943 N.W.2d 383 (Mem)
• Parties: PEOPLE of the State of Michigan, Plaintiff-Appellee, v. Brad Stephen HAYNIE, Defendant-Appellant.
• Court: Michigan Supreme Court

943 N.W.2d 383 (Mem)

PEOPLE of the State of Michigan, Plaintiff-Appellee,

v.Brad Stephen HAYNIE, Defendant-Appellant.

SC: 159619

COA: 340377

Supreme Court of Michigan.

June 5, 2020

Order

On order of the Court, leave to appeal having been granted and the briefs and oral arguments of the parties having been considered by the Court, we REVERSE that part of the April 16, 2019 judgment of the Court of Appeals addressing jury instructions and we REMAND this case to the Macomb Circuit Court for a new trial before a properly instructed jury. See M. Crim. JI 17.2.

On the basis of the prosecutor’s concession, we assume without deciding that assault and battery, MCL 750.81(1), is a lesser included offense of assault with intent to commit murder, MCL 750.83. The trial court erred by refusing to give the requested jury instruction because a rational view of the evidence supported a conviction for assault and battery. See People v. Cornell , 466 Mich. 335, 357, 646 N.W.2d 127 (2002). This error was not harmless as the evidence clearly supported an instruction on assault and battery. See id. at 363-366, 646 N.W.2d 127.

A requested instruction on a lesser included offense is proper if the greater offense requires the jury to find a disputed factual element that is not part of the lesser included offense and a rational view of the evidence would support it. Id. at 357, 646 N.W.2d 127. There was evidence presented at trial that defendant had the intent necessary for assault and battery—that he either intended to commit a battery upon his mother, Patricia, or intended to make her reasonably fear an immediate battery. See People v. Johnson , 407 Mich. 196, 210, 284 N.W.2d 718 (1979). However, the prosecutor argued that no rational view of the evidence in this case supports a conviction for anything less than assault with intent to commit great bodily harm less than murder. Whether the instruction on the lesser included offense should have been given thus turns on whether a rational view of the evidence supported the conclusion that defendant lacked both the intent to kill and the intent to do great bodily harm. See Cornell , 466 Mich. at 345, 646 N.W.2d 127. Patricia testified that she believed defendant lacked even the intent to commit great bodily harm against her—he had "gone out of his way his whole life, even as a toddler, to keep [her] from any kind of pain." Defendant’s sister testified that defendant and Patricia had a loving relationship, and there was no testimony that defendant and Patricia had any kind of falling out that might have motivated an intent to seriously harm or murder her. Defendant’s statements to Patricia during the assault suggested that his intended purpose was to help his mother by ridding her of the devil—"[M]om, I've got to save you, Lucifer has you ...." Because "believability is for the jury to decide, not appellate judges," People v. Silver , 466 Mich. 386, 394, 646 N.W.2d 150 (2002), the jury could have chosen to believe this testimony. A rational view of these facts regarding defendant’s intent would allow a jury to conclude that defendant committed assault and battery.

The dissenting statement argues that defendant has offered insufficient evidence to obtain the instruction on the lesser offense, relying on the severity of Patricia’s injuries in contrast. But, as observed by the dissenting opinion in the Court of Appeals, "there is no quantum of injury necessarily associated with an assault and battery." People v. Haynie , 327 Mich. App. 555, 571, 934 N.W.2d 71 (2019) ( GLEICHER , J., dissenting). While the severity of injury bears on intent, it is not necessarily dispositive, and the jury should be free to make its own determination after weighing the evidence.

We further conclude that this error was not harmless given that the evidence clearly supported an instruction on assault and battery. See Cornell , 466 Mich. at 363-366, 646 N.W.2d 127.¹ As was the case in Silver , defendant’s alleged victim corroborated his theory of the case by testifying that she did not believe defendant intended to injure her. In addition, defendant’s sister’s testimony and the absence of testimony indicating a heightened intent supported defendant’s theory. Not giving the jury an instruction that allowed them to consider defendant’s comparative guilt as to assault and battery undermines the reliability of the verdict. See Silver , 466 Mich. at 393, 646 N.W.2d 150. Accordingly, we REVERSE the judgment of the Court of Appeals and REMAND to the circuit court for a new trial.

We do not retain jurisdiction.

Clement, J. (concurring).

I concur in full with the Court’s order. Because the People have conceded the issue of whether assault and battery is a necessarily included lesser offense of assault with intent to murder, we do not decide the issue today. I write separately to go over the questions that I believe will need answering if we take up this issue in the future.

As a general matter, when an offense consists of "different degrees, ... the jury, or the judge in a trial without a jury, may find the accused not guilty of the offense in the degree charged in the indictment and may find the accused person guilty of a degree of that offense inferior to that charged in the indictment ...." MCL 768.32(1). There has, over the years, been much debate about how to implement this statute, which, as we noted in People v. Cornell , 466 Mich. 335, 341, 646 N.W.2d 127 (2002), has been around in substantially identical form since 1846. The recurring issue is how to identify which lesser offenses a jury should be instructed upon, such that it could return a verdict as to an "offense inferior to that charged in the indictment."

One rule is to instruct on "cognate" offenses based on the facts adduced at trial. Thus, in People v. Jones , 395 Mich. 379, 236 N.W.2d 461 (1975), overruled by Cornell , 466 Mich. at 357, 646 N.W.2d 127, the defendant was charged with second-degree murder. The trial testimony was that the defendant shared an apartment with the victim; on a particular day, a friend of the victim’s came to visit, and while the victim and her friend were chatting in the kitchen, the defendant got a shotgun from a closet, aimed it at the victim, and fired it, killing her. Id. at 384-385, 236 N.W.2d 461. The defendant testified on his own behalf and conceded that he had obtained the shotgun from the closet, but claimed that he had only intended to brandish it for the purpose of scaring the visitor into leaving; he asserted that he did not know the weapon was loaded, that he did not intentionally aim it at anyone, and that the weapon only accidentally discharged when he was bumped by the visitor (who he had successfully induced into fleeing). Id. at 385, 236 N.W.2d 461. The jury was instructed as to second-degree murder and voluntary manslaughter, but the trial court rejected the defendant’s request to instruct the jury as to MCL 752.861, which criminalizes killing or injuring a person with the careless, reckless, or negligent discharge of a firearm. Id. at 385-386, 236 N.W.2d 461. We adopted a rule that "[i]f the lesser offense is of the same class or category, or closely related to the originally charged offense, so as to provide fair notice to the defendant that he will be required to defend against it, the lesser offense is or may be included within the greater." Id. at 388, 236 N.W.2d 461. While MCL 752.861 is not a necessarily included lesser offense of second-degree murder—because MCL 752.861 requires the use of a firearm, while second-degree murder does not—we held under this test that the jury should have been instructed as to MCL 752.861 anyway. "Because the evidence adduced at trial would have supported a guilty verdict on the offense of careless, reckless or negligent discharge of firearms causing death, the trial court was required to ... instruct the jury that such offense was a lesser included offense of the charge of second-degree murder." Id. at 390, 236 N.W.2d 461.

In Cornell , we rejected this rule of "cognate" lesser offenses. Instead, we held that a jury could only be instructed under MCL 768.32(1) as to necessarily included lesser offenses. We repudiated the Jones rule and said a regime of necessarily included lesser offenses was more faithful to the text of the statute. Cornell , 466 Mich. at 354, 646 N.W.2d 127. In doing so, we also concluded that requiring that a lesser included offense be necessarily included was more consistent with Hanna v. People , 19 Mich. 316 (1869), an early case that had construed what is now codified as MCL 768.32(1). Cornell remains our controlling interpretation of the statute, so Michigan requires that a lesser offense be necessarily included in the charged offense for a jury to be instructed as to a lesser offense.

This contrast between Cornell ’s "necessarily included" rule and the preceding caselaw played out in the Court of Appeals’ disposition of this case. The majority, which held that assault and battery is not a lesser included offense of assault with intent to murder, did so on the basis of People v. Ross , 73 Mich. App. 588, 252 N.W.2d 526 (1977). In Ross , the Court of Appeals was implementing our rule from Jones . In particular, Ross drew on some discussion in Jones of People v. McDonald , 9 Mich. 150 (1861). In McDonald , the defendant had been charged with assault with intent to murder, and we held that the defendant could also be convicted of assault and battery on such a charge. We observed in Jones that "under a strict ‘necessarily included’ test, an assault and battery offense would not be included, as battery is an element not required for the higher assault with intent to murder offense," and concluded that McDonald was evidence that we had not always consistently adhered to a line between "cognate" lesser included offenses and "necessarily" included lesser offenses. Jones , 395 Mich. at 389, 236 N.W.2d 461. On the strength of the remark in Jones , Ross then...