For the second time in little over a month, the Colorado Supreme Court split 6-1 in upholding a defendant’s convictions based on a jury verdict that seemed to logically contradict itself.

David Lindsey, a criminal defense attorney based in Englewood, called the court’s ruling “one of those decisions like they throw at you in the very first week of law school to try and train your brain not like how a normal person would think, but how a lawyer would think.”

A Logan County jury found Michael W. Struckmeyer guilty on two counts of child abuse arising from an incident in his home. Struckmeyer was babysitting a young child when he called 9-1-1 to report that she had fallen down stairs and lay unconscious, not breathing. Upon the child’s arrival at the hospital, personnel discovered she had a traumatic brain injury.

One doctor who treated the girl opined at trial that the cause of injury was physical abuse rather than accidental harm, given the severity of the damage.

However, Struckmeyer appealed his convictions, arguing that the first count of child abuse that was knowing or reckless was logically inconsistent with the second count of child abuse that was the result of criminal negligence. In Struckmeyer’s view, acting knowingly or recklessly required jurors to believe he was aware of a risk for bodily injury. Criminal negligence, on the other hand, entailed the lack of such awareness.

A panel of the Colorado Court of Appeals reversed Struckmeyer’s convictions in December 2018 and ordered a new trial. They agreed with the defendant that when an element of one crime negates another crime’s element, it is not possible to issue a guilty verdict for both. As such, Struckmeyer could not have been simultaneously aware and unaware of the risk to the child.

At the time, the judges relied on the decision from a separate case, People v. Rigsby, issued only a few weeks earlier. In that instance, another appellate panel tossed two seemingly contradictory convictions for a defendant accused of reckless or intentional assault, and assault arising from criminal negligence. 

Despite the appeals court’s conclusion that it could not discern the intent of jurors given the outcome, the Colorado Supreme Court disagreed in finding no legal inconsistency.

“[E]ven if each of the guilty verdicts for second degree assault is logically inconsistent with the guilty verdict for third degree assault,” wrote Justice Carlos A. Samour, Jr. in the Sept. 14 opinion in the Rigsby case, “no legal inconsistency exists.”

Samour explained that acting with criminal negligence was actually an element of all crimes in which the defendant’s culpable mental state was a factor. It was not, as the defense had argued, a mutually exclusive element. While someone could potentially act solely with criminal negligence, but not knowingly or with intent, anyone who acted knowingly would also be committing criminal negligence.

Similarly, Samour wrote in an opinion issued on Monday that even if Struckmeyer’s convictions were logically inconsistent, they were legally consistent because the defendant’s reckless act necessarily included an element of criminal negligence.

Justice Richard L. Gabriel dissented, as he did in the Rigsby case, writing that he would order a new trial for Struckmeyer, finding both legal and logical inconsistency to the verdicts.

Lindsey, the criminal defense lawyer, believed the Supreme Court correctly decided the case on legal principle, but noted that such logically inconsistent verdicts would become problematic if the defendant received a sentence for each crime. The Sixth Amendment’s double jeopardy prohibition bars multiple sentences that arise from the same criminal offense. Lindsey said that the defendant instead receives a sentence for the more serious offense.

The ruling “essentially allows the prosecution to argue, ‘This conduct was intentional. But maybe it’s an accident. Maybe it’s negligence,'” he added. Lindsey explained that by allowing prosecutors to pursue both intentional conduct and criminal negligence charges, that advantage “gives the prosecution a lot of room to shift around depending on how the evidence might come in at the trial.”

The case is People v. Struckmeyer.