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Duncan v. Commonwealth4/8/2003
despite the strict construction afforded penal statutes, a defendant "is not 'entitled to a favorable result based upon an unreasonably restrictive interpretation of the statute.'" Id.
Following these principles, Code § 18.2-371.1(B)'s child endangerment provision should be read in harmony with subsection (A), which addresses acts or omissions resulting in "serious injury to the life or health of such child." Read this way, Code § 18.2-371.1 contains a dichotomy between behavior causing serious harm to a child in subsection (A) and behavior creating a realistic risk of serious harm to a child in subsection (B). In this sense, subsection (B) equally condemns a parent who, for example, exposes a child through criminal negligence to the risk of a nonfatal gunshot wound every bit as much as one who exposes a child to a lethal one. It should be unnecessary to have to prove that the wound, had it been inflicted, would have likely killed the child. By incorporating the actus reus in subsection (A), subsection (B)'s endangerment provision limits liability to criminal negligence that creates a realistic risk of "serious harm to the life or health" of the child.
II.
When faced with a challenge to the sufficiency of the evidence, we "presume the judgment of the trial court to be correct" and reverse only if the trial court's decision is "plainly wrong or without evidence to support it." Davis v. Commonwealth, 39 Va. App. 96, 99, 570 S.E.2d 875, 876-77 (2002) (citations omitted); see also McGee v. Commonwealth, 25 Va. App. 193, 197-98, 487 S.E.2d 259, 261 (1997) (en banc).
When a jury decides the case, Code § 8.01-680 requires that "we review the jury's decision to see if reasonable jurors could have made the choices that the jury did make." Pease v. Commonwealth, 39 Va. App. 342, 355, 573 S.E.2d 272, 278 (2002) (en banc). "We let the decision stand unless we conclude no rational juror could have reached that decision." Id. The same standard applies when a trial judge sits as the fact finder because "the court's judgment is accorded the same weight as a jury verdict." Shackleford v. Commonwealth, 262 Va. 196, 209, 547 S.E.2d 899, 907 (2001).
In other words, when faced with a challenge to the sufficiency of the evidence, a reviewing court does not "ask itself whether it believes that the evidence at the trial established guilt beyond a reasonable doubt." Jackson v. Virginia, 443 U.S. 307, 318-19 (1979) (emphasis in original and citation omitted). It asks instead whether "any rational trier of fact could have found the essential elements of the crime beyond a reasonable doubt." Id. at 319 (emphasis in original). This deference applies not only to the historical facts themselves, but the inferences from those facts as well. "The inferences to be drawn from proven facts, so long as they are reasonable, are within the province of the trier of fact." Hancock v. Commonwealth, 12 Va. App. 774, 783, 407 S.E.2d 301, 306 (1991).
Governed by this standard of review, the evidence satisfies the sufficiency test. A rational fact finder could have found Duncan guilty under Code § 18.2-371.1(B). Duncan left a six-month-old baby with strangers he had met briefly only the day before. During his seven-hour hiatus, Duncan failed to provide any nutrition or hydration for the infant. Upon returning, Duncan failed to feed the infant for at least another two hours. When the baby began "crying and making a lot of noise" after having no nourishment or hydration for about ten hours, Duncan stated he would "take care of the problem" and willfully gave the infant a bottle containing alcohol, a known diuretic. Had the child slept the rest of the night from the alcohol, the next day
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