McNeil v. Commonwealth

468 S.W.3d 858, 2015 Ky. LEXIS 1764, 2015 WL 4979715
CourtKentucky Supreme Court
DecidedAugust 20, 2015
Docket2014-SC-000163-MR
StatusPublished
Cited by15 cases

This text of 468 S.W.3d 858 (McNeil v. Commonwealth) is published on Counsel Stack Legal Research, covering Kentucky Supreme Court primary law. Counsel Stack provides free access to over 12 million legal documents including statutes, case law, regulations, and constitutions.

Bluebook
McNeil v. Commonwealth, 468 S.W.3d 858, 2015 Ky. LEXIS 1764, 2015 WL 4979715 (Ky. 2015).

Opinion

OPINION OF THE COURT BY

. JUSTICE ABRAMSON

Cedric McNeil appeals as of right from a Judgment of the Jefferson Circuit Court convicting him of first-degree robbery, Kentucky Revised Statute (KRS) 515.020, and first-degree assault, KRS 508.010. In accord with the jury’s recommendations, [861]*861the trial court sentenced McNeil to consecutive maximum terms of ten years for the former and eighteen years for the latter offense. McNeil was accused of stealing a purse from an acquaintance, Donna Wheeler, and of furthering the theft by running over Wheeler’s friend, Candra Rose, with a car. At trial, McNeil argued that this was a case of mistaken identity, the two women having incorrectly picked out his photograph from a photo array shown to them by the police. On appeal, McNeil contends that the jury instructions with respect to both offenses were flawed, that his sentences for both assault and robbery in effect punish him twice for a single offense in contravention of constitutional and statutory provisions against double jeopardy, and that his trial was rendered unfair when a police officer was permitted to refer to an unauthentieated phone company record in violation of the rule against hearsay. Convinced that there was no reversible error, we affirm.

RELEVANT FACTS

At McNeil’s January 2014 trial, Wheeler testified that in mid-November 2012 she received several hundred dollars in settlement of a law suit and that she used some of the settlement proceeds to reserve a week’s lodging for herself and Rose at the Louisville Manor Inn on Dixie Highway in the Shively area of south Louisville. A couple of days before, she and Rose had struck up an acquaintanceship with a man who introduced himself as- “B,” and in the interim Wheeler had used Rose’s phone to exchange a number of text messages with her new acquaintance. Wheeler testified that one of the first things she did upon taking up residence at the hotel was to invite “B” to come visit.

According to Wheeler, “B” arrived that first evening while Rose was in the shower. Wheeler left the room briefly to buy drinks from a vending machine, and when she left the room, she testified, her purse was on the bed. Soon after Wheeler returned from the vending machines, Rose emerged from the bathroom, and Rose testified that as she came into the main room she saw “B” leaving the room with one of his hands held inside the front of his jacket, as though he was concealing something there. She called out to “B” to wait for a minute; exclaimed to Wheeler, “He’s got your purse;” and when “B” began to run, ran after him out of the room and down the stairs. Both women chased “B” to the parking lot where he locked himself in his car.

Wheeler testified that she pounded on the driver’s window demanding that “B” give back the purse, and Rose testified that she stood in front of the car and looked directly into “B’s” eyes. He told her to move; she told him to surrender the purse. Rose testified that “B” drove slowly forward and forced her to back up a few steps, but that when she continued to block his path and to look into his eyes he suddenly accelerated and knocked her down. She testified that she became lodged beneath the car, was dragged for several feet, and was only “spit out” when “B” finally stopped, backed up a bit, and drove forward again with enough momentum to get over a speed bump.

The trauma doctor who treated Rose testified that in addition to severe abrasions on her back and arms, Rose suffered multiple broken ribs, a collapsed lung, an injured kidney, and a spleen so badly injured that it had to be removed so as to stop the internal bleeding. Rose testified that she spent thirteen days in the hospital as a result of her injuries, and that in January 2014, some fourteen months after the incident, she still suffered pain in her ribs and that occasionally she lost both feeling and function in her right arm and hand.

[862]*862The incident was witnessed by another person who was pulling into the parking lot at the time, and it was recorded by three hotel security cameras. The witness described and the videos depicted a driver every bit as callous as the person Wheeler and Rose claimed stole Wheeler’s purse, but neither the witness nor videos could give the jury more than a very general idea of what the driver looked like.

To prove that the driver was McNeil, the Commonwealth presented testimony by its investigators to the effect that one of the phone numbers Wheeler used to contact “B” turned out to be a Cricket company number, which, upon inquiry at a local Cricket outlet, was found to be registered to McNeil. Having made that discovery, the officers prepared a “photo pack,” — an array of six photos, McNeil’s and five others similar to his — which the officers then showed, separately, to Wheeler and to Rose. Both women picked out McNeil’s photo from the array as very likely the person who had robbed them, and both women testified at trial that the defendant in the courtroom, McNeil, was that person to a virtual certainty. McNeil did not testify, but through cross-examination and argument he attempted to cast doubt on those identifications.

On appeal, McNeil complains primarily about what he asserts were flaws in the jury instructions. The first-degree assault instruction, he maintains, omitted one of the elements of the crime, and the first-degree robbery instruction deprived him of his right to a unanimous verdict. We begin our discussion with these assertions of instructional error.

ANALYSIS

I. The Assault Instruction’s Omission of a Finding That the Car Was a Dangerous Instrument Was Harmless.

KRS 508.010 provides that
[a] person is guilty of assault in the first degree when
(a) He intentionally causes serious physical injury to another person by means of a deadly weapon or a dangerous instrument; or
(b) Under circumstances manifesting extreme indifference to the value of human life he wantonly engages in conduct which creates a grave risk of death to another and thereby causes serious physical injury to another person.

KRS 500.080(3) defines “dangerous instrument” as “any instrument, including parts of the human body when a serious physical injury is a direct result of the use of that part of the human body, article, or substance which, under the circumstances in which it is used, attempted to be used, or threatened to be used, is readily capable of causing death or serious physical injury.”

The first-degree assault instruction in this case directed the jury to

find the defendant, CEDRIC MCNEIL, guilty of Assault in the First Degree ... if, and only if, you believe from the evidence beyond a reasonable doubt all of the following:
A. That in Jefferson County, on or about November 17, 2012, he caused a serious physical injury to Candra Rose by hitting her with a car; AND
B. That in so doing:
(1) The defendant intended to cause serious physical injury;
OR

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Cite This Page — Counsel Stack

Bluebook (online)
468 S.W.3d 858, 2015 Ky. LEXIS 1764, 2015 WL 4979715, Counsel Stack Legal Research, https://law.counselstack.com/opinion/mcneil-v-commonwealth-ky-2015.