First Degree Murder by Means of Poison – Requirements

As the reader may be aware, there are two degrees of murder.  The California state legislature reserved first degree murder for the types of murders that are “cruel and aggravated” and thus “deserving of greater punishment” as first degree murder, in comparison to other types of malicious and intentional killings, which are punishable as second-degree murder.  People v. Sanchez (1864) 24 Cal. 17, 29.

First degree murder traditionally included murder “perpetrated by means of poison, or lying in wait, torture, or by any other kind of willful, deliberate and premeditated killing.”  1 Hittel’s Cal. Gen. Laws from 1850 to 1864.

In Shasta County, Defendant Rose Brown gave birth to a baby girl in a hotel room  In the fifth day of her life, while laying face down between her sleeping parents who were both under the influence of heroin, Brown’s newborn daughter stopped breathing and died.

When Brown awoke and noticed this, she directed the baby’s father to call 911.  Brown then administered CPR, following the 911 dispatcher’s instructions, until the ambulance arrived.  Further efforts to resuscitate Brown’s daughter were unsuccessful.

An autopsy revealed traces of heroin-derived morphine and methamphetamine in the baby’s body fluids and in the contents of her stomach. 

 

The Shasta County District Attorney charged Rose Brown with first degree murder and prosecuted the charge on the theory that Ms. Brown had poisoned her newborn by feeding her breast milk after smoking heroin and methamphetamine.

At trial, the judge instructed jurors that to convict Brown of first degree murder they had to find that she committed “an act” with the mental state of malice aforethought that was a substantial factor in causing her baby’s death and that she “murdered by using poison.”  The instructions did not require the jury to find that Brown acted with any particular, heightened mental state when she fed her baby her breast milk. 

The instructions thus allowed the jury to convict Brown of first degree murder if it found that she acted with malice – a mental state that normally would only support a conviction for second degree murder – and that poison was a substantial factor in causing the baby’s death.

Based on these instructions, the jury convicted Brown of first degree murder of her newborn daughter, for which the judge imposed a sentence of 25 years to life in prison.

Brown appealed the verdict to the California Supreme Court, arguing that the jury instructions were incomplete (and thus the verdict was incorrect) because the instructions did not require the jury to find she fed her daughter her breast milk with a mental state equivalent to the willfulness, deliberation and premeditation that generally distinguishes first degree murder from second degree murder.

The prosecution argued that the jury instructions were fine because any murder by poisoning another is sufficient to elevate the murder to first degree without proof of any mental state required for other first degree murder convictions.

The California Supreme Court said, “[w]e conclude Brown has the better argument.”

Our state’s highest court then explained that in the “typical” first degree murder by poison case there is no question that the defendant acted with willfulness, deliberation and premeditation, so “we have never addressed whether there is a mental state component of first degree poison murder.” 

“We now clarify that to prove first degree murder by means of poison, the prosecution must show the defendant deliberately gave the victim poison with the intent to kill the victim or inflict injury likely to cause death.”

The highest court then stated that the omission of an element of an offense from a jury instruction violates “the right to a jury trial under the Sixth Amendment to the United States Constitution” by depriving the defendant of “a jury properly instructed in the relevant law.”  In re Martinez (2017) 3 Cal. 5th 1216, 1224.  The court therefore reversed the judgment and remanded the case to the trial court for further proceedings consistent with this ruling.