James Alex Fields is charged with first-degree murder in the death of Heather Heyer, for driving his car into a crowd of people on August 12. The defense has suggested that the defense will be that he was acting out of fear for his life — that he felt threatened by Antifa protesters a few blocks away.
So what does this mean, as a practical matter?
Here we go, taking a bit of a plunge into material that we discuss for about two weeks in first-year Criminal Law…
Fields is charged with first-degree murder, which has three elements:
- That Fields killed Heather Heyer;
- That the killing was malicious;
- That the killing was willful, deliberate and premeditated.
Second degree murder has two elements:
- That Fields killed Heather Heyer; and
- That the killing was done with malice.
Voluntary manslaughter has three elements:
- That Fields killed Heather Heyer;
- That the killing was the result of an intentional act; and
- That the killing was committed without malice.
Involuntary manslaughter is not an option here — that requires that Fields was acting negligently, which I don’t think anyone will argue.
So under Virginia law, the jury will be instructed that “the difference between murder and manslaughter is malice. When malice is present, the killing is murder. When it is absent, the killing can be no more than manslaughter.”
“Malice” doesn’t necessarily mean what a lay person would think it means. We sometimes think that if I do something to you with “malice,” it means that I just really don’t like you — which is similar to the first dictionary definition of the term. According to the Merriam-Webster definition of “malice,” the first definition is:
1 : desire to cause pain, injury, or distress to another
The second definition is the starting point for the legal definition of “malice”:
2 : intent to commit an unlawful act or cause harm without legal justification or excuse.
In a murder case, the jury will be instructed on the following definition of “malice”:
Malice is that state of mind which results in the intentional doing of a wrongful act to another without legal excuse or justification, at a time when the mind of the actor is under the control of reason. Malice may result from any unlawful or unjustifiable motive including anger, hatred or revenge. Malice may be inferred from any deliberate, willful, and cruel act against another, however sudden.
Heat of passion excludes malice when that heat of passion arises from provocation that reasonably produces an emotional state of mind such as hot blood, rage, anger, resentment, terror or fear so as to demonstrate an absence of deliberate design to kill, or to cause one to act on impulse without conscious reflection. Heat of passion must be determined from circumstances as they appeared to defendant but those circumstances must be such as would have aroused heat of passion in a reasonable person.
If a person acts upon reflection or deliberation, or after his passion has cooled or there has been a reasonable time or opportunity for cooling, then the act is not attributable to heat of passion.
The place where the defense will focus, apparently, is on the second paragraph — that if the jury finds that you are under the influence of one of these emotions, so as to demonstrate an absence of deliberate design to kill, that emotion can be found to negate the existence of malice. So if the jury finds that Fields was acting under the influence of a level of fear or terror that was so great as to overwhelm the ability to form a specific intent to kill, his actions would not have been done with malice, and so he could only be guilty of manslaughter. If the jury found that he was acting from fear, but was not so distraught by fear that he was unable to think, he could still be found guilty of murder.
To further confuse the matter, the difference between first-degree murder and second-degree murder is whether there is an intent to kill:
“Willful, deliberate, and premeditated” means a specific intent to kill, adopted at some time before the killing, but which need not exist for any particular length of time.
An intent to kill could have been simply an intent flashing through his mind for a short period of time. It does not have to be the reason why James Fields came to Charlottesville. It doesn’t have to be the reason that he drove down Fourth Street in the first place. It would have to be the reason that he crashed his car into the crowd. The prosecution will rely, in part, on the Instagram photo that Fields posted showing another car plowing into protesters:
The defense is surely going to argue that Fields didn’t intend to kill, because when he was stopped, he told the police that he hoped that ambulances were going to help the people who were hurt, and when he learned that Heather had died, he cried. Those are mitigating facts, but the jury will have to decide what they mean.
First-degree murder is punishable by a sentence of from 20 years to life, second-degree murder is punishable by a sentence of from 5 to 40 years, and manslaughter is punishable by a sentence of from 0 to 10 years.
