State v. Dufield
| Citation | 549 A.2d 1205,131 N.H. 35 |
| Decision Date | 31 October 1988 |
| Docket Number | No. 87-176,87-176 |
| Parties | The STATE of New Hampshire v. Thomas V. DUFIELD. |
| Court | Supreme Court of New Hampshire |
Stephen E. Merrill, Atty. Gen. (Michael D. Ramsdell, atty. on the brief and orally), for the State.
James E. Duggan, Appellate Defender, Concord, by brief and orally, for defendant.
In appealing his conviction for reckless second degree murder, RSA 630:1-b, I(b), the defendant submits that the Superior Court (DiClerico, J.) erred in refusing to recognize a defense of voluntary intoxication rendering the defendant unable to experience a mental state of extreme indifference to the value of human life at the time charged in the indictment. We affirm.
The victim in this case was the defendant's sister, who went to his Claremont apartment late in the evening of February 17, 1984, and drank with him and some of his friends. When the friends left about 1:15 a.m., they observed the victim sleeping in a kitchen chair.
At 7:30 the following evening, one of the guests from the night before returned to the apartment, where she found the victim's dead and naked body face down on a sofa. The buttocks and thighs were fouled with blood and fecal matter, blood had discharged from the nose and mouth, and a toy Lincoln log protruded from the anus. A bloody flashlight and screwdriver were near the body, with pubic hairs and epithelial cells adhering to their surfaces, and beneath the sofa was a plastic object with wedge-shaped indentations containing feces. Blood and pubic hairs were found on the blades of a pair of scissors lying nearby.
A post mortem examination indicated that these objects had been inserted into the victim's vagina and rectum, and the autopsy revealed that the sterile environment of the abdominal cavity had been penetrated in three places. Analysis of the victim's blood showed an alcohol level of .54 percent by weight.
To the ensuing charge of second degree murder by causing the death "recklessly under circumstances manifesting an extreme indifference to the value of human life," RSA 630:1-b, I(b), the defendant sought to raise two alternative defenses. While he admitted inflicting the injuries described, he presented expert evidence that the victim had already died of alcohol poisoning before he performed the assaultive and mutilating acts. He also claimed that his own voluntary intoxication precluded any finding that he had, at the relevant time, experienced a mental state of extreme indifference to the value of human life. The trial court, however, declined to recognize this second defense. Although evidence of the defendant's intoxication came before the jury, the court refused to receive expert testimony offered to prove the incompatibility of that intoxication with a conscious mental state of extreme indifference. Nor would the court charge the jury that it might consider the intoxication when determining whether the State had proven such a state of mind.
The effect of the final sentence is that a voluntarily intoxicated individual, whose conduct exposes another person to the risk of specified harm that actually occurs, will be penalized if his behavior appears objectively to be a gross deviation from the norm of law-abiding conduct, even though the intoxication blinds him to the risk and thus prevents him from consciously choosing to disregard it.
When the defendant argues that this limitation on the relevance of voluntary intoxication to recklessness has no bearing on the application of the further element of acting "under circumstances manifesting an extreme indifference to the value of human life," see State v. Howland, 119 N.H. 413, 416, 402 A.2d 188, 191 (1979), he poses the basic question of how that element functions in raising a reckless homicide charge from manslaughter to murder. If, on the one hand, proof of "circumstances manifesting extreme indifference" required evidence from which a finder of fact would be able to infer a subjective state of indifference, consciously experienced at the time in question, then the defendant might plausibly argue that voluntary intoxication would be relevant to proof of that mental state. On this view, "indifference" would be regarded as an element of an offense comparable to a knowing or purposeful state of mind, which must be shown to have occurred with specific reference to the times and facts to which it relates. See RSA 626:2, II(a) and (b).
On the other hand, it could be that the function of proving the existence of "circumstances manifesting extreme indifference" is...
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State v. Campos
...intoxication is no defense to depraved-heart murder based on reckless state of mind), cert. denied (Dec. 6, 1991); State v. Dufield, 131 N.H. 35, 549 A.2d 1205, 1208 (1988) (same); Model Penal Code §§ 2.08(2), 210.2(1)(b) (1985) (noting that recklessness is one mens rea for criminal homicid......
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...New York, South Dakota, Washington, and Wisconsin. See Hooker v. State, 497 So.2d 982 (Fla. Dist. Ct. App. 1986); State v. Dufield, 549 A.2d 1205 (N.H. 1988); State v. Lyerla, 424 N.W.2d 908 (S.D. 1988); State v. Dunbar, 817 P.2d 1360 (Wash. 1991); State v. Spears, 433 N.W.2d 595 (Wis. Ct. ......
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Berthel v. New Hampshire, CIV. 99-533-B.
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