William G., In re
| Decision Date | 23 December 1997 |
| Docket Number | No. 1,CA-JV,1 |
| Citation | 192 Ariz. 208,963 P.2d 287 |
| Parties | , 259 Ariz. Adv. Rep. 48 In re WILLIAM G. 96-0202. |
| Court | Arizona Court of Appeals |
William G. ("the juvenile") appeals an adjudication of delinquency and resulting disposition arising from a charge of criminal damage. For the following reasons, we reverse the finding of delinquency.
In January 1996, the fifteen-year-old juvenile went shopping with his mother and two of his friends at the K-Mart shopping center in Lake Havasu. The juvenile bought shoes with his mother and then joined his friends outside in the parking lot, where the three began playing with shopping carts. The parking lot was described as busy. It was also sloped, higher at the K-Mart end and slanting downward from there. While putting his cart away, the juvenile struck a parked car in the lot.
The only eyewitness to the incident, Diane Samons, was sitting in her truck in the parking lot waiting for her companions to return. She observed the three boys with grocery carts "goofing off" in the parking lot. She testified:
Q. When you say goofing off, what are you describing?
A. Just probably biding their time, riding on them, flipping them up, having fun on carts.
Q. When you say flipping them up, were the wheels coming off the ground?
A. Oh, yeah, definitely.
Q. Two wheels?
A. Sometimes two wheels, sometimes all the wheels. They did very good jobs. I was watching them.
....
Q. How fast were they going?
A. I wouldn't say that they were going real, real fast. Just probably picking up enough momentum to do what they were doing. I don't know.
The incident in question was described by Ms. Samons:
Q. And why did they stop playing with them?
A. A middle aged woman ... came out of one of the stores, kind of in the middle right in front of my truck, and said put the carts up, or put them up, let's go, and the other two boys were the first ones to just kind of, you know, get rid of their carts.... I'm not going to say that I saw them, where they put their carts or how they put their carts away....
Q. What happened when the third boy tried to put his cart up?
A. Well, he was the last to put his cart up, and he was going to put his cart up, probably the closest--I am estimating here into what he might have been thinking--he was just going to, you know, ride it down and then kind of make that corner in front of my truck to pop it up on that little island there.
....
Q. What happened when he came around the corner to try to park it?
A. He overestimated, and when he--he flipped it up a little too early. When he landed back down on it, he rammed it into the vehicle that I was talking about previously.
....
Q. Okay. Is it also--was your impression watching [the juvenile] put up his cart, that he was intending to hit any other cars?
A. To the best of my knowledge, without writing a book on [the juvenile], I would imagine that, no, he would have to be a complete moronic idiot to want to try to hit a vehicle. I said I felt to the best of my knowledge that he was just going to get one last good ride in there and flip it up on the curb. That's--to the best of my knowledge, yes, that's what he was doing.
....
Q. And did he say anything to you?
A. No. I think I spoke first, and I asked him, I said are you going to pay to get that fixed, are you going to pay for that.
Q. What was his response to you?
A. His response to me--he was a little shocked. I think he was--probably wasn't expecting that to happen, and he said something ... it had something to do with don't you ever make mistakes, or it was an accident.
....
We did not exchange harsh words. He really was not rude to me. He didn't cuss at me or call me any names....
At that point, the juvenile's mother called to the juvenile that she was leaving and told him to get in the car. The juvenile then turned away from Ms. Samons and walked to his mother's car and they left the scene. Upset that the juvenile would simply walk away from the damage he had caused, Ms. Samons located the owner of the car who worked at a nearby store. The owner reported the incident to the authorities, who identified the juvenile and charged him with criminal damage, in violation of Arizona Revised Statutes Annotated ("A.R.S.") section 13-1602 (Supp.1996). At the juvenile's adjudication hearing, on the evidence set forth above, the court found the juvenile was criminally reckless, stating:
I believe that popping wheelies or however you want to say it, but flipping shopping carts near parked cars in a parking lot when it's done by 15 and 16 year olds, is something that--this is a substantial and unjustifiable risk of causing damages to those parked vehicles, and that the juvenile simply ignored what he was aware of, and in fact when he did cause damages, just took off and didn't intend to accept the responsibility for his actions.
The court adjudicated the juvenile delinquent for criminal damage and placed him on probation for a period of one year. Special terms and conditions of the disposition included forty hours of community service and fifteen days in the Mohave County Juvenile Detention Center. The juvenile was also ordered to pay $716.58 in restitution. The juvenile timely appealed.
A person commits criminal damage if he "recklessly" defaces or damages property of another person. A.R.S. § 13-1602(A)(1). The juvenile claims that the state presented insufficient evidence to prove the culpable mental state of recklessness.
Our review in this matter is focused on determining "whether, reviewing the evidence in the light most favorable to the judgment, a rational trier of fact could have found the essential elements of the offense beyond a reasonable doubt." Maricopa County Juvenile Action No. JT9065297, 181 Ariz. 69, 82, 887 P.2d 599, 612 (App.1994). In this case, there was no conflicting evidence presented. Only one eyewitness to the incident testified, Ms. Samons, and we have set forth in haec verba the substance of her account of the events. Thus, our analysis is based on the same operative facts that were before the juvenile court.
Our function on this review, then, is as the trier of law. We determine as a matter of law whether the evidence required for a finding of criminal recklessness existed in sufficient quantity so that any rational trier of fact could so find beyond a reasonable doubt. Jackson v. Virginia, 443 U.S. 307, 316, 319, 99 S.Ct. 2781, 2787, 2789, 61 L.Ed.2d 560 (1979) (). While we defer to the trial court's findings of fact and draw all reasonable inferences therefrom in support of the trial court's conclusions, we determine de novo whether the trial court had before it the quantity of evidence necessary to render the finding it did.
The culpable mental state of recklessness is applied either in connection with a result of an act or omission or in connection with enumerated circumstances, whichever may be encompassed in the particular criminal statute at issue. To conclude that an action was recklessly performed requires a showing:
that a person is aware of and consciously disregards a substantial and unjustifiable risk that the result will occur or that the circumstance exists. The risk must be of such nature and degree that disregard of such risk constitutes a gross deviation from the standard of conduct that a reasonable person would observe in the situation.
A.R.S. § 13-105(9)(c) (Supp.1996).
As is apparent from this definition, reckless conduct is a species of unintentional conduct and thus shares elements in common with ordinary, or "civil" negligence. However, we think it evident from the terms describing the offending conduct, including "consciously disregards," "substantial" and "gross deviation," that the legislature did not intend via section 13-105(9)(c) to criminalize acts or omissions amounting to no more than civil negligence. See Wayne R. LaFave & Austin W. Scott, Jr., Substantive Criminal Law § 3.7, at 329-33 (1986); Rollin M. Perkins, Criminal Law, ch. 7, § 2 at 666 (1957) (). In construing the reach of this statutory definition, then, we must attempt to demarcate the border between criminal recklessness and civil negligence to determine whether the legislature intended to criminalize this juvenile's conduct. To do so, we will compare and contrast principles of civil negligence with the corresponding concepts used by the legislature to define criminal recklessness, namely, awareness and conscious disregard of a substantial risk, which disregard constitutes a gross deviation from the applicable standard of conduct. 1
Mere inadvertence is sufficient to constitute civil negligence. W. Page Keeton et al., Prosser and Keeton on Torts § 31, at 169 (5th ed. 1984) (). By contrast, recklessness requires that the person be aware of and consciously disregard the risk his conduct is creating. We recognize that absent a person's outright admission regarding his state of mind, his mental state must necessarily be ascertained by inference from all relevant surrounding circumstances.
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