Vehicular homicide reversed, mens rea not proved

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For the second time, the Minnesota Supreme Court has reversed the criminal vehicular homicide conviction of a man who said he did not know he had struck a human being with his car when he left the scene of an accident.

The court applied heightened scrutiny in reviewing the element of mens rea, saying that it was not necessary that the entire conviction be supported by only circumstantial evidence for the higher standard of review to apply. Whenever an element of a conviction is supported by circumstantial evidence, that disputed element is subject to a heightened level of scrutiny, the Supreme Court ruled.  Applying  that scrutiny, the high court said the element of mens rea was not proved because the man could have been asleep or otherwise unaware he had struck a person or a vehicle when he drove away from the accident.

The Supreme Court reversed State v. Al-Naseer in a 4-2 decision written by Justice Alan Page.  Chief Justice Lorie Gildea and Justice Christopher Dietzen dissented, and Justice David Stras did not participate.

“We … decline to impose a new duty on a driver to stop and investigate if he is not aware that he hit a person or vehicle,” Page wrote.

The opinion is one of four cases dealing with circumstantial evidence with which the high court has dealt over the past year and a half or so, said Assistant State Public Defender Roy Spurbeck, the defendant’s attorney.  The court established a test in State v. Andersen that it followed in this case, he said. The Andersen test is that if any one or more circumstances found proved are inconsistent with guilt, or consistent with innocence, then a reasonable doubt as to guilt arises.  This case shows how the test works when the evidence is insufficient, he said.

“If Mr. Al-Naseer couldn’t have won under the circumstantial evidence test, I can’t think of a defendant who would have won,” Spurbeck said.

He said that double jeopardy bars any further prosecution of the defendant, who is left with only a conviction for careless driving although he did serve 48 months in prison.

Long and complicated history

As the court observed, the case has a long and complicated procedural history.  The defendant originally was convicted of two counts of criminal vehicular homicide after a hit-and-run accident.  The driver allegedly struck a man changing a flat tire, causing the man’s death.

The Court of Appeals affirmed a conviction for vehicular homicide based on gross negligence but reversed the leaving-the-scene conviction because the jury instructions on mens rea were erroneous.

The Supreme Court affirmed the leaving-the-scene reversal and reversed the gross negligence conviction because the court failed to instruct the jury on the lesser-included offense of careless driving.

On remand, in a bench trial, the defendant was convicted of leaving the scene and careless driving.

The Court of Appeals reversed the leaving the scene conviction and remanded for additional findings on mens rea.  Both sides appealed, the Supreme Court accepted the state’s petition for review, then agreed with the remand for a determination of mens rea. The court again found the defendant guilty of leaving the scene, based on the parties’ briefs and previous record. The Court of Appeals said there was enough evidence to support the verdict but that the defendant’s due process right to a new trial was violated.

In the instant appeal the Supreme Court reversed  on the grounds that the evidence did not support the conviction, without reaching the constitutional challenges.

Asleep at the wheel?

The accident occurred on Highway 10 in Clay County  at approximately 11:30 p.m.  The Supreme Court said that the defendant struck a man changing a flat tire and the accident caused significant damage to his vehicle. Police stopped him about six miles from the accident, where he was driving about 45 mph with a flat tire, both headlights off, and hazard lights flashing.  The defendant said he had hit something but he did not know what.

The state relied on circumstantial evidence to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that the defendant had actual knowledge of facts imposing on him a duty to stop, i.e., that he knew he had been in an accident with a person or a vehicle.

The Supreme Court applied a heightened scrutiny standard of review, examining whether the reasonable inferences that can be drawn from the circumstances proved support a rational hypothesis other than guilt. If any circumstances found proved are inconsistent with guilt, or consistent with innocence, then a reasonable doubt as to guilt arises. The heightened standard of review is not limited to cases where every element required for conviction is proved entirely by circumstantial evidence, the court said.

“The circumstances proved include evidence from which it could be reasonably inferred that [the defendant] was asleep or otherwise unconscious when his vehicle hit [the decedent]. Thus, on the element of scienter, the circumstances proved are consistent with a rational hypothesis other than guilt, that is, that [the defendant ] was asleep or otherwise unconscious at the time of the accident and therefore would not have known that he had hit a person or a vehicle,” Page wrote.

To now suggest that a driver has a duty to stop and investigate even though he does not know what he hit, much less that a failure to stop and investigate renders a driver’s lack of knowledge about what he hit unreasonable as a matter of law, is a dramatic change from established law, the court continued.

One reasonable inference

The dissent argued that if only reasonable  inferences were drawn from the circumstantial evidence, the state proved that the defendant knew he was in an accident with another vehicle or person.

“The conclusions the majority gleans from the circumstances proved, while theoretically possible, are simply not reasonable,” Gildea wrote.