Proximate Death: How A Random Chain Of Events Can Sink A Criminal Case
Almost anything that starts the chain of events leading to death can be blamed on the person who started that chain.
I just lost a trial that I should have won. There was more than enough reasonable doubt to ram a truck through the prosecution’s case, but the jury convicted anyway, and not with much thought. What I underestimated was the power of the charge. It was a murder case, but not with an immediate death. The charge dealt with proximate cause and how almost anything that starts the chain of events leading to death can be blamed on the person who started that chain. It sunk our case.
The trial took 10 days and included experts from both sides talking about cause of death. The jury came back in just four hours. When I asked for polling (a request that each juror affirm the guilty verdict in his own voice), none betrayed a qualm or a quiver. Only one juror agreed to speak to us — a young woman. She seemed on the verge of tears and said the decision was tough. But how tough could it have been when it took only four hours including lunch?
My client, a man in his 60s suffering from kidney disease, will now get a minimum of 15 years to life in prison. (And parole generally never lets anyone out at the minimum.)
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The interesting part was he didn’t kill anyone — at least not initially. But according to the government, he started a chain of events that ultimately (the jury found) led to the victim’s death 77 days later. After the verdict, the prosecutor said this would be one for the record books in Medical Examiner annals, establishing a connection between a criminal incident and death so long after.
It was alleged that my client accosted the victim — a younger man he knew well — on the street and stabbed him in the chest. This was caught on video although no weapon could be seen in my client’s hand. Following the altercation, the victim walks away unperturbed. When he reaches the corner, he collapses.
911 is called and the victim rushed to the hospital where he’s operated on. The following day, in the ICU, he’s arrested. You see, the victim had his own open criminal case and a warrant for his arrest.
He is then handcuffed to the bed and guarded by police round the clock. Upon his hospital discharge, instead of going home for R and R, he is incarcerated and thereafter subjected to some of the worst medical treatment anyone can get. Still, he does well enough to exercise (often popping his own stitches) and beat the crap out of fellow inmates. Eventually he’s moved to solitary confinement as punishment. It’s at the end of this 10-day stint that he drops dead of a blood clot. A 30-centimeter clot had formed in his left leg, ultimately causing a saddle embolism in his lung. Doctors testified that the onset of movement following a sedentary period can cause a clot (or a piece of it) to dislodge. They believe this is what traveled to his lungs and killed him.
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My client, originally only charged with assault, was indicted for murder. The theory was that because the stabbing caused the surgery which then caused the victim’s immobility in the hospital, that’s what started the clot growing.
Our expert testified that there was no sign that any clot formed during surgery or at any time during the victim’s hospital stay. What’s more, because the victim had a genetic predisposition that favored clotting, the large clot could have been formed any time at Riker’s Island from trauma to that area (such as beating the crap out of someone). Or it could have just formed on its own.
The jury didn’t buy it. They didn’t care that no hospital records showed any telltale signs of a clot — swelling, heat, redness. They just figured (according to the juror we spoke to) that the hospital (a big city institution) missed it — mere conjecture on their part based largely on anti-hospital sentiment.
I was shocked by the glib manner in which they convicted. While a jury is instructed not to think about sentence — come on! Everybody knows convicting a guy of murder buys him a life in prison. You’d think they could have at least asked for some read-back.
In big cases like this, a post-mortem (so to speak) by the defense team on what went wrong is crucial. There’s always something to learn. What could I have done better? How were we so wrong about the jurors we’d picked? Ultimately, I concluded that we were charged out of the box.
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Law on proximate cause is broad. So broad that if an action taken by a defendant plays any role in leading to a person’s death, he can be held liable for murder — no matter how many intervening circumstances exacerbated the injury. It doesn’t matter if the decedent could have been treated and avoided death with proper medical care. It doesn’t matter if the victim hastened his own death through his own screw-up — in this case, by being placed in a sweltering hot 8-foot by 10-foot cell for 23 hours a day as punishment. There’s even a case in New York where the victim was shot in the head by a defendant and later decided to kill himself due to depression. The defendant was found guilty of murder under the theory that had the victim not been shot, he wouldn’t have taken his own life.
Remember James S. Brady, Ronald Reagan’s press secretary who was shot in 1981 by John Hinckley? When he died 33 years later, the death was ruled a homicide based on the original shooting. Officials never brought new murder charges against Hinckley (he had already been charged with shooting Reagan and was found not guilty by reason of insanity). But they could have.
The law of proximate cause is tough for any defendant to beat and tough for a defense attorney to explain to his client. “How could I possibly be held responsible for a guy who died months later, was in jail due to his own criminal acts, and ultimately had a blood clot that might have been completely random?” the client thinks.
The expansiveness of the law subtly shifts the burden of proof from the government to the defense. This jury believed it was the defendant’s burden to show the stabbing had nothing to do with the victim’s death, rather than the State’s burden to prove that it definitely had.
My client will appeal. I only wish I could have made the complexity of the law more clear to him when he was offered a sentence of 11 years. But every time I broached the subject his answer was always the same, “I didn’t do nothing.”
The jury found otherwise.
Toni Messina has tried over 100 cases and has been practicing criminal law and immigration since 1990. You can follow her on Twitter: @tonitamess.
