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State v. Perez-Cervantes8/24/2000
had been completely precluded from arguing to the jury that the defendant did not cause the death of the victim. These cases, therefore, merely establish that a jury verdict will not fail on sufficiency of the evidence grounds due to an alleged intervening cause; these cases are hardly authority for the trial judge to rule, as a matter of law, that the defense could not dispute causation to the jury.
Only two cases mentioned by the majority do not involve sufficiency of the evidence challenges, but they nonetheless provide no support for the majority's holding. State v. Yates, 64 Wn. App. 345, 824 P.2d 519 (1992), concerned a dispute over the wording of a jury instruction on cause of death where life support had been removed from the victim. The jury was fully instructed on proximate cause 'and those instructions gave Yates a proper basis from which to argue his case to the jury.' Yates, 64 Wn. App. at 352 (emphasis added).
State v. Baruth, 47 Wash. 283, 91 P. 977 (1907), might lend some support to the majority's position were this a case involving negligent acts of medical malpractice in the treatment of Thomas' wound. In Baruth, this court affirmed the trial court's sustaining of an objection to defense cross examination of a doctor where the defense sought to elicit that the victim might have survived had he received better medical treatment. Baruth, 47 Wash. at 296-97. The Baruth court merely restated the already well established rule that ordinary medical negligence in the treatment of the wound inflicted is not a defense to murder. Baruth, 47 Wash. at 296 ('Where one unlawfully inflicts upon the person of another a wound calculated to endanger or destroy life, it is no defense to a charge of murder where death ensues to show that the wounded person might have recovered if the wound had been more skillfully treated.').
The rule stated in Baruth, however, is limited to cases involving medical negligence because medical negligence is considered foreseeable as a matter of law. This rule does not apply to grossly negligent acts, or to intentional acts, especially when those acts are committed by the victim.
LaFave and Scott describe this distinction in their treatise on criminal law:
The most common case {of intervening cause} involves the negligent treatment of wounds by a doctor or nurse. A, intending to kill B, merely wounds him; but the doctor so negligently treats the wound that B dies. It is generally held that A is guilty of murdering B, i.e., that A's act legally caused B's death, unless the doctor's treatment is so bad as to constitute gross negligence or intentional malpractice. In short, mere negligence in medical treatment is not so abnormal that the defendant should be freed of liability. 1 Wayne R. LaFave & Austin W. Scott, Jr., Substantive Criminal Law sec. 3.12, at 408-09 (1986) (emphasis added) (citations omitted); see also People v. Saavedra-Rodriguez, 971 P.2d 223, 225-27 (Colo. 1998) (distinguishing between ordinary negligence and gross negligence or intentional acts for purposes of causation in homicide case).
In examining this rule of law, it is apparent it does not support the result urged by the majority. This case does not involve negligent medical treatment by Thomas' physicians; it does not involve medical malpractice at all. Instead, this case involves Thomas' voluntary and intentional ingestion of illegal and possibly life threatening controlled substances.
While, indisputably, the jury would be entitled to find these acts were foreseeable to Perez-Cervantes and, therefore, did not break the chain of causation, the trial judge had no authority to prevent the defense from arguing this fa
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