Colorado’s second-highest court overturned a defendant’s vehicular homicide conviction and 12-year prison sentence on Thursday after determining a Douglas County judge omitted key language from the jury instructions that could have resulted in a different outcome.

James Paul McDonald was driving in excess of 100 mph on Interstate 25 when he left the road and went airborne. The crash ejected one of his passengers, Stevie Brown, from the car. Although she sustained injuries, she survived the impact. Instead, she died at the hospital seven hours later, as staff was preparing to intubate her.

At McDonald’s 2023 trial, jurors heard from the forensic pathologist who later performed Brown’s autopsy, Dawn Holmes. Blood samples showed that Brown had high levels of methamphetamine and fentanyl upon her admission to the hospital. Moreover, those levels increased during her hospitalization.

Holmes suggested the increase could have resulted from hospital staff administering fentanyl, from “postmortem redistribution” of drugs in Brown’s body, or from Brown’s use of drugs “during or around the time of the accident.”

Holmes added that Brown “could also have been potentially using while she was in the hospital at the time. I don’t know.”

She ultimately found that Brown died from the combination of drug intoxication and injuries from the crash. Holmes also believed Brown could have died from the meth use alone, and that her car crash injuries were not lethal.

To find McDonald guilty of vehicular homicide, jurors would need to conclude that his driving was the “proximate cause” of Brown’s death, meaning the act that led to the death. The defense asked Chief Judge Ryan Stuart to also instruct the jury that it could determine Brown’s intoxication was an “intervening cause” of her death, such that McDonald’s driving was not grounds to find him guilty.

Although Stuart initially mused that the circumstances seemed “exactly like the type of independent intervening cause that case law talks about,” he declined to give the instruction. Stuart called it “speculation” that Brown used drugs in the hospital, but allowed the defense to argue its theory to the jury anyway.

Ultimately, he instructed jurors that there “can be more than one proximate cause” of Brown’s death, but they could convict McDonald if his actions “in natural and probable sequence produced the death.”

A three-judge Court of Appeals panel disagreed with Stuart’s assessment of the evidence.

“While neither party presented direct evidence that the passenger used methamphetamine while at the hospital, sufficient circumstantial evidence supported McDonald’s theory,” wrote Judge Grant T. Sullivan in the March 5 opinion.

He elaborated that jurors could have found it was unlikely Brown had used drugs in the hospital, even with the additional instruction. But the blood evidence and Holmes’ testimony about the non-lethal nature of the accident injuries supported the defense’s theory for why the instruction was appropriate.

“Viewed together and in the light most favorable to McDonald, this constitutes some credible evidence that the passenger would have survived if the level of methamphetamine in her body hadn’t increased while at the hospital,” wrote Sullivan.

Because the instructions permitted jurors to convict McDonald even if they believed Brown’s intoxication was the key factor leading to her death, the appellate panel ordered a new trial.

The case is People v. McDonald.