Heavy drinking and crossword puzzles really don't mix. It could lead to criminally negligent homicide ... or can it? Yesterday, the Second Department vacated a conviction of criminally negligent homicide finding that the evidence was legally insufficient - People v Krotoszynski, 2007 NY Slip Op 06437. The facts were as follows.
The defendant and his girlfriend, Elzbieta Bieda, shared an apartment. On a June afternoon the defendant and his friend, the decedent, Walter Stelmach, got into an altercation inside the defendant's apartment after a night and subsequent day of heavy drinking. They were both inebriated. The defendant was insisting that the decedent leave the apartment, but the decedent was so drunk that he was unable to stand up and leave the apartment on his own. During a lull in their argument, girlfriend Bieda, who was working on a crossword puzzle, asked the decedent for help with one of the words in the puzzle. After the decedent gave her the answer, the defendant struck Bieda on the side of the head with a remote control, then pushed her causing her to fall into furniture and onto to the floor. The defendant screamed and cursed at Bieda telling her to leave the room.
As Bieda ran from the room, the defendant began striking the decedent with his hands and the decedent subsequently fell to the floor. Bieda saw the defendant drag the decedent from the defendant's apartment into the hallway of the apartment building. The hallway floor and stairs were made of a hard, stone-like material. The apartment door closed behind them and Bieda did not see what happened in the hallway. Bieda testified that the defendant came back inside the apartment alone and sometime between 5:00 P.M. and 7:00 P.M., he left the apartment.
The decedent was found in the hallway by a neighbor who testified that he arrived at home sometime between 5:00 P.M. and 7:00 P.M. Shortly after he arrived at home, this neighbor heard a lot of noise in the hallway and when he looked through the peephole he saw the decedent lying face-up with his head a couple of inches from a staircase. EMT personnel arrived at 7:16 P.M. who found the decedent lying on his back and bleeding from the right side of his head. The EMTs did not observe blood anywhere on either the staircase leading up to the floor where the decedent was found or the staircase leading up to the roof above that floor.
The medical examiner (hereinafter the ME) concluded with a reasonable degree of medical certainty that the decedent's cause of death was blunt force trauma to the head. The ME acknowledged that blunt force was either being struck with something hard or hitting something hard. The ME also testified that the skull fractures sustained here were more extensive than simple skull fractures. Thus, the ME opined with a reasonable degree of medical certainty, that the skull fractures sustained by the decedent were caused by a greater force than that which would be the result of a punch to the head, and were inconsistent with a fall down stairs, or a fall to the ground from a prone, sitting, or standing position. The skull fractures, however, were consistent with a force such as a kick to the head.
In finding that the evidence was legally insufficient to prove criminally negligent homicide, the Second Department found that the defendant's actions of striking the decedent with his hands could not be a contributory cause of the decedent's death. In addition, the Court found that the evidence adduced by the People failed to establish that it was reasonably foreseeable that the defendant's conduct in dragging the decedent by his foot into the hallway over a hard stone-like floor would result in the decedent's death so as to qualify as a sufficiently direct cause of death. Finally, any other theories advanced by the People at trial regarding as to what might have occurred during the two-hour period during which the decedent was in the hallway the Court found to be purely speculative.
The Court did affirm a conviction for assault in the second degree.
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