People
v. Burroughs
Supreme
Court of
35
Cal.3d 824, 201 Cal.Rptr. 319, 678 P.2d 894.
Dressler,
pp. 296-300
Facts: The defendant was a “faith
healer” type dude who tried to heal a guy who had leukemia. The guy died nastily. The healer dude was charged with felony
practicing medicine without a license and felony second degree murder based on
the “inherently dangerous felony” rule.
The trial court instructed the jury that practicing medicine without a
license is as a matter of law “inherently dangerous to human life”. The defendant was convicted on both
counts. He appealed.
Issue: Is the unlicensed practice
of medicine an “inherently dangerous felony” such that it will support a
conviction of second degree murder?
Rule: To determine whether the
felony-murder rule should apply in
1. Does the primary
element of the offense necessarily involve danger to human life?
2. Do the factors
elevating the offense to a felony render that offense dangerous to human
life?
Analysis: In the first step, the
court finds that it is possible to practice medicine without a license without
endangering human life. For example, you
could treat someone with a very mild ailment in a very low-risk way and still
technically be found guilty of practicing medicine without a license.
In the
second step, the court interpreted the statute forbidding the unlicensed
practice of medicine and found that death was only one felonious harm among
several that was contemplated. The other
harms considered in the statute are not necessarily life-threatening.
The
court reasserts that they don’t like the felony-murder rule and they will
strive to limit it as much as possible.
They also say that it is unlikely that the defendant could have been
deterred from doing what he did by the threat of prosecution for murder.
Conclusion: The defendant’s second
degree murder conviction was reversed.
Notes
and Questions
1.
I like that this guys states a decent new rule even
though there isn’t strictly any logical basis for it but only a moral
basis for it.
2.
Here are two alternative “inherently dangerous”
standards: a felony is considered inherently dangerous if (1) it is “dangerous
in the abstract” or (2) it is dangerous based on the facts of the case. The former seems sensible because there are
some felonies that are dangerous and some that arguably are not. The latter standard doesn’t make sense
because if the felony resulted in death, then, duh, of course it was
dangerous.
3.
First, it is not hard to conceive of a case where
you can falsely imprison someone without any risk of killing them (lots and
lots of Superglue maybe?). Second, the
factors elevating false imprisonment to a felony are “violence, menace, fraud, or
deceit”. If you tell someone, “Hey, step
on this floor! It’s great!” but you’re
really getting them to step on super-sticky Superglue in order to falsely
imprison them, you’re not doing something inherently dangerous. So if we note the “or” above, we must find
that false imprisonment under the statute cited is not inherently
dangerous.
4.
A. I think this
is tough, especially if you are big on gun control. I think we need to focus on how much more
dangerous it is for a convicted felon to carry a concealed firearm than it is
for any normal schmoe to carry a concealed firearm. Imagine that someone committed securities
fraud and was convicted of a felony. If
they get out and start carrying around a concealed weapon, we might well think
it’s not any more dangerous than any ordinary schmoe carrying a concealed
weapon around. So I would say that this
felony is not inherently dangerous in the abstract.
B. Here, you can
imagine that someone could fire at a house in the correct belief that it is currently
unoccupied. That wouldn’t be inherently
dangerous if we want to read it narrowly for the purposes of avoiding the felony-murder
rule.
5.
The problem here is that the felony is not dangerous
in the abstract because a seventeen-year-old probably could survive without oversight
alone. On the other hand, and on the
basis of these particular facts, leaving a baby, a newborn,
without any one of those four things could very well cause the death of
that baby. The outcome of the case would
heavily depend on which standard you choose.
The statute could have been constructed differently such that there was
a different (stricter?) standard of care for children under three or two or one
than for children above that age. Scalia
would say that having caught the legislature with their pants down, it’s up to
the legislature to pull their pants back up.