e-Journal Summary

e-Journal Number : 76784
Opinion Date : 01/06/2022
e-Journal Date : 01/24/2022
Court : Michigan Court of Appeals
Case Name : People v. Lewis
Practice Area(s) : Criminal Law
Judge(s) : Per Curiam - Cavanagh and M.J. Kelly; Dissent - Servitto
Full Text Opinion
Issues:

Motion to quash; Second-degree murder; Proximate cause; Crash data retrieval (CDR)

Summary

In these consolidated appeals, the court affirmed the trial court's order granting defendant-Lewis’s motion to quash the information and dismiss two charges of second-degree murder. The trial court held that "the district court abused its discretion when it bound Lewis over on the second-degree murder charges on the basis that the prosecution failed to establish Lewis was the proximate cause of the crash." The prosecution argued that the evidence showed Lewis unrelentingly chased victim-D while driving upwards of 90 mph "before his vehicle made contact with hers, causing it to crash into a tree and explode." There was, however, "insufficient evidence to support a finding that Lewis’s vehicle made contact with [D’s] before the crash. The surveillance video [did] not show any contact between the two vehicles in the moments immediately preceding the crash. Moreover, the CDR report only support[ed] an inference that, at an unknown time on April 9, 2019, the vehicle that Lewis was driving was involved in a nondeployment event. It can be inferred from the damage to the vehicle that the event involved contact between the front bumper of Lewis’s vehicle and another object." However, there was "no evidence linking the damage on Lewis’s front bumper with damage on the rear of" D’s vehicle. "Thus, although the nondeployment event is consistent with the prosecution’s theory that Lewis hit her vehicle, there is no way to reasonably infer that, because Lewis’s vehicle was involved in an event resulting in minor damage to his front bumper, he must have hit [D’s] vehicle just before the crash." The remaining evidence showed that he observed D's "vehicle and began following her. In response to a vehicle following her, [D] slammed on the brakes and then sped away. She eventually stopped and Lewis approached the passenger side." There was "no evidence that he made any verbal threats, that he displayed a weapon, or that" D recognized him. Rather, as he approached the passenger side, the passenger shouted at D to go. In response to that command, D sped away, eventually reaching approximately 90 mph. "Her driving was erratic. At the time, her blood alcohol level was 0.032 and she had marijuana in her system." Thus, it was D’s "independent actions— driving at a high rate of speed while high and intoxicated—that were a superseding cause that led to her crashing the vehicle. Additionally, because no action taken by Lewis made the crash reasonably foreseeable, [D’s] actions constituted both an intervening and superseding cause that severed the causal link between Lewis’s actions and the crash." Affirmed.

Full Text Opinion