Williams v. Commonwealth

323 S.E.2d 73, 228 Va. 347, 1984 Va. LEXIS 310

• Court: Supreme Court of Virginia
• Decided: November 30, 1984
• Docket: Record 831620
• Status: Published

Opinions

CARRICO, C.J.,

delivered the opinion of the Court.

On the night of January 7, 1983, the defendant, Charles Thomas Williams, was driving west on U.S. Route 460 in Bedford County when he struck and killed a pedestrian, Mark Forest Reeves. Charged with involuntary manslaughter, Williams was convicted by a jury and sentenced to serve three years in the penitentiary.¹

The evidence showed that Reeves was walking with his back to traffic along the right-hand westbound lane of Route 460, a four-lane divided highway, that he was struck on the paved portion of the roadway, and that Williams’ car proceeded in a straight line both before and after it struck Reeves. There was evidence indicating that Reeves was intoxicated,² that he was weaving on and off the pavement, and that other cars had to move to the left lane to avoid him. There was also evidence that a companion told Reeves to “get out of the road” and that Reeves said “he didn’t have a damn thing to live for and jumped right out ... in front of the car.”

The issue on appeal is whether the trial court erred in refusing Williams’ proffered Instruction E. The instruction reads:

The Court instructs the Jury if they find that the intoxication and actions of the decedent, Mark Forest Reeves, were the proximate cause of his death, they shall find Charles Thomas Williams not guilty of the charge of manslaughter.

Williams argues that proximate cause was the “salient issue” in his manslaughter trial. He maintains that, given the evidence of Reeves’ condition and conduct and guided by Instruction E, the jury could have found that the actions of Reeves constituted an intervening cause, superseding the antecedent acts of Williams and becoming the sole proximate cause of the accident. Hence, Williams concludes, Instruction E was of “critical importance” to his defense.

We do not believe that the trial court erred in refusing Instruction E. In the first place, the instruction was defective in form. As worded, the instruction assumed that Reeves was intoxicated, and, therefore, it would have usurped the jury’s prerogative to decide whether he was intoxicated or not.

Furthermore, two instructions granted for the Commonwealth and three granted for the defense encompassed the theory of proximate cause.³ Under these instructions, Williams could have argued and the jury could have found that Reeves’ conduct was the proximate cause of the accident. A “refusal to grant instructions covering principles of law upon which the jury has already been properly instructed is not error.” Asbury v. Commonwealth, 211 Va. 101, 107, 175 S.E.2d 239, 243 (1970).

For these reasons, we will affirm Williams’ manslaughter conviction.

Affirmed.

1 Williams was convicted by the same jury of failing to stop at the scene of an accident, for which he received a one-year sentence. He was charged also with driving under the influence; he entered a plea of guilty to this charge and was convicted and fined $300.00. These convictions have become final and are not involved in this appeal.

2 A blood test performed during an autopsy showed that Reeves’ blood contained 0.22% alcohol by weight.

3 One of the defense instructions defined “the ‘proximate cause of an event [as] a cause which, in natural and continuous sequence, unbroken by any efficient, intervening cause, produces the event, and without which the event would not have occurred.’ ”