Rolfes v. State

Morton, J., delivered the opinion of the Court. Having been convicted of manslaughter in a non-jury trial in the Criminal Court of Baltimore and given a five year suspended sentence, appellant first contends in this ²⁰⁶ appeal that the evidence was legally insufficient to sustain her conviction. The record indicates that appellant, who had been separated from her husband, returned home sometime after nine o’clock in the evening after having consumed “a dozen mixed drinks” over a period of several hours at a neighborhood tavern and took some “Librium” for her nerves. Not having had dinner, she sent her young son to a local carry-out restaurant for food and while he was gone she procured a butcher knife and a fork, sat down in a chair and awaited his return.

Shortly thereafter the son entered the front door with the food, followed by his stepfather who was appellant’s estranged husband. The son testified that his mother, upon seeing the husband, told the husband to “Get out of here.” The husband at first retreated toward the door but as the appellant got up from the chair, he came toward her. According to the son, the appellant shook the knife at her husband and said: “Get out of here.” When the husband continued toward the appellant “she swung around and hit him” with the knife, cutting his hand. Thereupon, according to the son: “My stepfather rushed forward and knocked her down on her knees.

She was back, they were wrestling for about two minutes, and well, my father grabbed her hand, and he was pulling her up and the knife went in him.” The husband then staggered out the door, went to a house across the street from which he was taken to a hospital where he was pronounced dead “due to a stab wound of the chest which penetrated the pulmonary artery.” The appellant testified that she remembers her husband, Gerry, came into the house and “[t]he only thing I remember after that is Gerry coming after me, and I put my hand out. That’s all I do remember. I think I remember him saying to me something like, ‘You stabbed me,’ or ‘You hit me.’ I said, T didn’t.’ That was it, and I didn’t think I had, because I didn’t even realize that I had a knife in my hand.” Manslaughter is a common law felony and is defined as ²⁰⁷ the “unlawful and felonious killing of another, without malice aforethought, either expressed or implied, and is either voluntary or involuntary homicide, depending upon the fact whether there was an intention to kill or not.” Neusbaum v. State, 156 Md. 149, 155 . Inasmuch as the trial judge found that “the homicide was not deliberate or intentionally done”, the crime here involved is involuntary manslaughter.

As stated by this Court in State v. Gibson, 4 Md. App. 236 at 242: “Involuntary manslaughter at common law has been generally defined as the killing of another unintentionally and without malice (1) in doing some unlawful act not amounting to a felony, [footnote omitted] or (2) in negligently doing some act lawful in itself, or (3) by the negligent omission to perform a legal duty. See 1 Warren on Homicide (Perm. Ed. 1938), 420, 421; 26 Am. Jur.

Homicide, Sec. 18, 44; 40 C.J.S. Homicide, Sec. 55, and cases therein cited. To this basic definition other authorities add the qualification, as to the first class of involuntary manslaughter, that the unlawful act be malum in se, and not merely malum prohibitum, and as to the second and third classes of the offense, that the negligence be criminally culpable, i.e., that it be gross. Clark and Marshall, Crimes (Sixth Ed.), Sections 10.04, 10.12-10.14; Perkins on Criminal Law, pp. 34, 57-61; Wharton’s Criminal Law and Procedure, (Anderson Ed.), Vol. 1, Sections 289-292, 296, and cases therein cited.” Moreover, in Maryland when “a prosecution for involuntary manslaughter is based on the commission of an unlawful act causing death, the act must itself be dangerous to life.” State v. Gibson, supra, at 243. The trial judge, prior to rendering the guilty verdict, stated his findings and concluded that as the victim ap ²⁰⁸ proached the appellant, she “swung at him”