Link to the Opinion on the Superior Court website.
SUMMARY: After being convicted by a jury of first-degree murder and possession of an instrument of crime, Chine challenged the sufficiency and weight of the evidence underlying the jury's conviction, and claimed that the trial court erred in not instructing the jury on self-defense and voluntary manslaughter. The Superior Court rejected Chine's arguments.
After outlining the standards for sufficiency and weight challenges, the court rejected the first two arguments, specifically focusing on the issue of whether malice had been proved (PA requires three elements to be proved for a first-degree murder conviction: 1) human is killed; 2) caused by the accused; 3) with malice and specific intent to kill). As Chine had confessed to intending to shoot the victim in the head, the court focused on the fact that malice could be inferred from the use of a deadly weapon on a vital portion of the victim's body. Chine had shot the victim in the back of the head as the defendant was walking away from him and had said "yeah, pussy, boom boom" after killing defendant.
Additionally, the court found that Chine's belief and pleading at trial that the victim was going to his car--which was 90 feet away--to get a gun was insufficient to allow Chine to use deadly self-defense preemptively. Nor did these facts require the trial court to issue the instruction on self-defense. The court stated "we fail to see how it was necessary for Appellant to kill the victim to protect himself from the imminent danger of death when the unarmed victim neither threatened Appellant nor spoke to him, but actually acted as a peacemaker in calming down his brother. Even if we believe that the victim’s brother threatened Appellant, we see no reason why Appellant should be entitled to use deadly force on the victim," particularly when the "threat" that Chine acted on was that the victim gave his brother the keys to a car where there might be a gun. (Opinion at p.10)
Chine did not fully flesh out his argument with legal authority or meaningful analysis on whether or not the voluntary manslaughter instruction should have been given by the trial court. As a result, this claim was deemed waived.
This case seemed pretty cut-and-dry, given the factual circumstances from the trial and the confession. The case does highlight that the facts underlying self-defense claims must present a case of truly clear-and-present danger, not the inchoate possibility of danger stemming from threats of harm and concurrent movement towards a car where there might be a gun.
RESULT: Conviction Affirmed (Chine loses on all grounds), 3-0
JUDGES: Stevens, P.J., Bender, J., and Donohue, J.
Read the opinion by Stevens, P.J.