State v. McCormick, Minn.Ct.App., 8/12/2013. A jury found Mr. McCormick guilty of second degree manslaughter. I’ll get to the facts in a minute but it has to do with a deer stand. The trial court then denied Mr. McCormick’s motion for a judgment of acquittal but granted his mistrial based upon prosecutorial misconduct; the prosecutor elicited statements attributed to the deceased, J.B., even though the trial court had excluded all such statements. The trial court also said that the state could retry him. Mr. McCormick appealed the denial of his motion for judgment of acquittal and the double jeopardy claim.
Mr. McCormick discovered a deer stand which he believed, incorrectly, was on his property. Mr. McCormick confronted J.B., who was on the deer stand at the time, about getting the deer stand off his property. During this exchange the deer stand collapsed. This was midmorning. That evening, J.B. was taken by ambulance to the hospital where medical providers discovered that J.B. had a dislocated shoulder, multiple broken ribs, and thoracic spinal fractures. Almost three weeks later J.B. died from complications from those injuries.
Back to the deer stand. After the thing collapsed J.B. rode back to his camp on his ATV. Members of his hunting party said that J.B. was uncharacteristically quite during lunch, his face was flushed; no one, however, saw any signs that he was in pain. Before lunch, J.B. cleaned his rifle that had got plugged with mud when the deer stand fell, then test fired it. After lunch, J.B. went to a different deer stand, although with some difficulty. Between six and seven that evening, another member of J.B.’s hunting party found J.B. lying in bed still dressed in his hunting gear and boots; he was moaning and groaning, breathing heavily, struggling to breath and in pain. That’s when the medics were called.
Mr. McCormick made several statements about what had occurred. The gist of each of his statements was that the deer stand had tipped over as he either climbed or got onto the stand in order to give J.B. what for about the trespass, as well as to give him a business card. (The cops found the card amidst the collapsed deer stand.) He also recorded a reenactment of the stand’s collapse, which, again, had the stand tipping over when he tried to give J.B. a business card. The doctors weighed in on each side about manner and cause of death. The state’s docs said it was from the injuries from the collapse of the deer stand; the defense doc said, no, it had to be from injuries sustained separately thereafter, between the time that J.B. had gone to the second deer stand and when he was found in bed back at his camp.
Now the lawyers get into it. What is the correct standard of review? If the appeal is a challenge to the sufficiency of the evidence to support the jury’s verdict then that verdict enjoys a deferential standard of review. The reviewing court’s job is to identify all reasonable inferences that can be drawn by the jury from the circumstances proved by the evidence and to determine whether those inferences support any rational hypothesis other than guilt. State v. Al-Naseer, 788 N.W.2d 469 (Minn. 2010); State v. Anderson, 784 N.W.2d 320 (Minn. 2010). Here, the court of appeals said that there is no verdict because the trial court’s grant of a mistrial vacated that verdict. According to the majority, the appeal is from the denial of a motion for judgment of acquittal, review of which presents a question of law, reviewed de novo. It thus falls to the reviewing court to identify those reasonable inferences that can be drawn from the evidence, and for the reviewing court to determine whether those inferences support any rational hypothesis other than guilt.
In a 2-1 opinion, the court of appeals says that they don’t. The majority concludes that some inferences that can be drawn are inconsistent with guilt and there is thus a reasonable doubt as to guilt. The majority also upholds the trial court determination that the state could retry Mr. McCormick. The dissent would have used the more deferential standard of review and would have upheld the denial of the motion for judgment of acquittal.
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