Kish v. State

145 So. 3d 225, 2014 Fla. App. LEXIS 13388, 2014 WL 4242757
CourtDistrict Court of Appeal of Florida
DecidedAugust 28, 2014
DocketNo. 1D13-1093
StatusPublished
Cited by7 cases

This text of 145 So. 3d 225 (Kish v. State) is published on Counsel Stack Legal Research, covering District Court of Appeal of Florida primary law. Counsel Stack provides free access to over 12 million legal documents including statutes, case law, regulations, and constitutions.

Bluebook
Kish v. State, 145 So. 3d 225, 2014 Fla. App. LEXIS 13388, 2014 WL 4242757 (Fla. Ct. App. 2014).

Opinion

OSTERHAUS, J.

Appellant Jennifer Kish appeals her convictions on three counts of culpable negligence under section 784.05(1), Florida Statutes, for allowing her children, ages 10, 8, and 7, who were sick with cold and upper respiratory symptoms, to be left unsupervised for two to three hours after school until adults arrived home from work. Ms. Kish argues that the trial court should have granted her motion for judgment of acquittal because the evidence was insufficient to establish culpable negligence. We agree and reverse.

I.

A.

On January 26, 2012, Ms. Kish was called away to Jacksonville in the middle of the day because her mother had a medical emergency. Ms. Kish expected to return home late, after her children’s school day ended, so she called the school and arranged for the school bus to drop off her 10-, 8-, and 7-year-old children at the home of her former husband and his wife (the “Meadows”). Ms. Kish had not rerouted her children like this before, but the Meadows were trusted caregivers. They were the father and step-mother of the 10-year-old child and shared custody of her with Ms. Kish.1 The children had taken the school bus to the Meadows’ house before and the Meadows regularly welcomed the children in their home. Ms. Meadows was home by 8 PM on most school days, or at least by 6 PM on days when the Meadows’ other children stayed late at school.

Ms. Kish did not advise the Meadows of her emergency on January 26th, or that the children would be coming over after school.2 And no one was home when the school bus dropped off the children at the Meadows home at about 3:45 PM. Nevertheless, the children let themselves in the house, did homework, and watched TV. At some point within the next couple hours, the 8-year-old began vomiting, the 7-year-old’s nose began to run, and the [227]*22710-year-old testified that she was “running a high fever and panicking.” Nonetheless, the 10-year-old cared for her siblings by cleaning them up in a bath and looking for medicine. When the Meadows arrived home around 6 PM, they were surprised to see the children in their home, sick and unsupervised. And they were quite upset with Ms. Kish.

Ms. Meadows found all three children to have fevers and she gave them medicine. The Meadows tried, unsuccessfully, to contact Ms. Kish (only later did they learn from a Facebook post that Ms. Kish was in a Jacksonville emergency room with her mother). The Meadows also contacted the police, in order to file a report, and the father of the two younger children. Hours later, they took the children to the emergency room.

At the hospital, the eldest was diagnosed ■with bronchitis and the other two with upper respiratory infections, or common colds. The record indicates that Ms. Kish arrived back from Jacksonville at about 9 PM, but found no one home at the Meadows’ house. Having no information about where anyone was, she searched for them for a couple of hours before ultimately arriving at the hospital around 11 PM. The police arrived later and, after questioning Ms. Kish, they arrested her.

B.

The State charged Ms. Kish with three counts of felony child neglect. A bench trial was held in October 2012, in which the State’s ease set forth the basic facts described above. After the state rested, Ms. Kish moved for a judgment of acquittal asserting that the State had presented insufficient evidence establishing a probability of harm to the children, or establishing a total want of care. But her motion was denied. In the trial court’s view:

None of [the children] seemed overly mature.... And the facts of the matter are [that the children] were sick before school started and a call was made to the school to put them on a bus to go to an empty house. Why that second call wasn’t made to the dad to say, hey, your child and my other two children are coming to your house because I have an emergency, I don’t know. But that’s what the facts are before the court now, and I do find that it rises to the level of ... culpable negligence.

Defense counsel renewed the argument for acquittal in its closing.

Ultimately, the trial court acquitted Ms. Kish of child neglect, but it found her guilty of three counts of the lesser offense of culpable negligence. The court withheld adjudication and sentenced Ms. Kish to 12 months’ probation. Ms. Kish then filed a timely appeal of the trial court’s decision to deny her motion for a judgment of acquittal.

II.

This Court reviews the trial court’s denial of a motion for judgment of acquittal de novo, with the evidence and all reasonable inferences from the evidence being viewed in a light most favorable to the State. See Ramos v. State, 89 So.3d 1119, 1122 (Fla. 1st DCA 2012) (citing Jones v. State, 790 So.2d 1194, 1196-97 (Fla. 1st DCA 2001)). It is a crime in Florida to expose another person to personal injury through culpable negligence. § 784.05(1), Fla. Stat. “Culpable negligence” isn’t statutorily defined, but has been defined in caselaw consistent with the standard jury instruction used by the trial court in this case:

For negligence to be called culpable negligence, it must be gross and fla[228]*228grant. The negligence must be committed with an utter disregard for the safety of others. Culpable negligence is consciously doing an act or following a course of conduct that the defendant must have known, or reasonably should have known, was likely to cause death or great bodily harm.

Fla. Std. Jury Instr. (Crim.) 16.6. And the facts are critical; culpable negligence is determined “upon the facts and the totality of the circumstances in each particular case.” See Ibeagwa v. State, 141 So.3d 246 (Fla. 1st DCA 2014).

In denying the motion for judgment of acquittal, the trial court determined that Ms. Kish could be criminally culpable due to the children’s ages, the uncertain prospect of adult supervision at the Meadows home, and the children’s sicknesses. But we find this evidence insufficient to sustain Ms. Kish’s conviction for culpable negligence. The facts simply don’t show Ms. Kish to have had a “gross and flagrant ... utter disregard for the safety of [her children or] a course of conduct that [she] must have known, or reasonably should have known, was likely to cause death or great bodily harm.”

Rather, the evidence showed Ms. Kish tried to provide for her children’s safety on an especially difficult day. Encountering a family emergency mid-day while the children were at school, Ms. Kish called the children’s school and changed their bus route because she didn’t expect to be home when the children arrived. She opted to have the school bus drop her children off at the home of trusted caregivers, who were often home at that time and invariably welcomed the children. Now, it is true that Ms. Kish did not confirm whether the Meadows would be home to actually supervise the children. And she should have. But her incomplete regard for her children’s care in this instance didn’t manifest an “utter disregard” for their safety.

Moreover, the children in this case weren’t so young that leaving them alone in a familiar home for a couple hours could be considered a gross, flagrant, and utter disregard for their safety, or an act “likely to cause death or great bodily harm.” The children were 10-, 8-, and 7-years-old.

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Cite This Page — Counsel Stack

Bluebook (online)
145 So. 3d 225, 2014 Fla. App. LEXIS 13388, 2014 WL 4242757, Counsel Stack Legal Research, https://law.counselstack.com/opinion/kish-v-state-fladistctapp-2014.