Opinion
NOT TO BE PUBLISHED
Superior Court County of Ventura, No. 2008038218, Patricia M. Murphy, Judge
Leonard J. Klaif, under appointment by the Court of Appeal, for Defendant and Appellant,
Kamala D. Harris., Attorney General, Dane R. Gillette, Chief Assistant Attorney General, Pamela C. Hamanaka, Senior Assistant Attorney General, Lance E. Winters, Michael A. Katz, Deputy Attorneys General, for Plaintiff and Respondent.
YEGAN, J.
Gerardo Rosales Villa appeals his conviction, by jury, of gross vehicular manslaughter while intoxicated. (Pen. Code, § 191.5, subd. (a).) The jury found true four sentence enhancement allegations that appellant personally inflicted great bodily injury on his passengers, Guillermo Aguiniga, Juan Gallardo, Raul Fletes, and Horacio Sanchez. (§ 12022.7, subd. (a).) At a subsequent bench trial, the court found appellant guilty of driving with a suspended license and found that he had a prior conviction for driving under the influence of alcohol. (Veh. Code, §§ 14601.2, subd. (a), 23152.) The trial court sentenced appellant to a total term in state prison of 22 years. Appellant contends the trial court erred when, during the jury trial, it admitted evidence that his driver's license was suspended when the incident occurred. We affirm.
All statutory references are to the Penal Code unless otherwise stated.
The trial court imposed the upper term of 10 years for gross vehicular manslaughter plus four consecutive terms of three years for each great bodily injury enhancement.
Facts
In the early morning hours of September 13, 2008, appellant was driving his mother’s white Honda carrying several passengers. He was traveling at least 65 miles per hour on a country road where the speed limit is 45 miles per hour. He crossed a center median and crashed into a pitched embankment and a power pole. The car landed on its roof; its passenger side was more heavily damaged than was the driver's side. Appellant was the only survivor.
The crash caused a power outage at 5:00 a.m. A Southern California Edison troubleshooter, Thomas Wilson, arrived on the scene at about 6:05 a.m. He found the overturned car and saw bodies lying on the ground nearby. After checking each body for a pulse, Wilson found only one survivor: appellant. Appellant was inside the car, lying on his back on top of a victim's body, mostly on the passenger side of the car, with his legs tucked under the dashboard. He was not wearing a seat belt or shoulder harness.
Wilson yelled into appellant's ear and was surprised when he opened his eyes. He asked appellant to move his legs and they "just came right out from under the dash. So he didn't appear to have any injuries." Appellant moved out from under the car on his own. He did not wait for the paramedics to arrive and Wilson did not help him.
Paramedics arrived about 15 minutes later. They confirmed that four victims were dead. Appellant complained about pain in his shoulder but had no other injuries. He was transported to the Ventura County Medical Center. The treating emergency room physician noted that appellant had suffered no serious injuries, but had sustained trauma to the skin and soft tissue, known as an erythema, running from left to right across appellant's left shoulder and collarbone. The doctor concluded the erythema was caused by the shoulder harness portion of a seat belt.
A California Highway Patrol Officer, Jamie Morado, saw appellant at the hospital that morning. Officer Morado noted bruising that started on his left shoulder and continued to the collarbone and across his chest toward his right hip. Appellant had no similar injury to his right shoulder or collarbone. Officer Morado noted that appellant smelled of alcohol, had red, watery eyes and somewhat slurred speech.
Appellant denied that he was the driver of the car; claiming that he was sitting in the front passenger seat. Officer Morado doubted that claim because it was inconsistent with the bruising he noted on appellant's body. Morado also doubted whether anyone sitting in the passenger seat could have survived the crash because the passenger side was the point of impact. The roof was ripped off at that point and the entire passenger side had been crushed.
Officer Morado administered two preliminary alcohol screening tests. The first such test, administered at 8:40 a.m., yielded a blood alcohol content of.10. The second test, administered four minutes later, had the same result. Appellant was arrested and his blood was drawn at 8:51 a.m. The blood sample yielded a blood alcohol content of.11. A forensic scientist offered the expert opinion that, at the time of the crash, appellant's blood alcohol content could have been as high as.155. The analysis of appellant's blood sample also disclosed the presence of methamphetamine in a concentration that is typically associated with being under the influence of that drug.
Discussion
Appellant's driver's license was suspended after he was convicted of driving while under the influence of alcohol in May 2007 and August 2008. After the incident at issue here, appellant was charged with both gross vehicular manslaughter while intoxicated (§ 191.5, subd. (a)), and driving with a suspended driver's license. (Veh. Code, § 14601.2, subd. (a).) The trial court agreed to bifurcate the jury trial on the manslaughter charge from a nonjury trial on the remaining charge. Although it excluded from the jury trial evidence of appellant's prior DUIs, the trial court stated that it would allow evidence of appellant's suspended driver's license. Appellant contends this was error because the status of his driver's license is not relevant to the question of whether he drove in a grossly negligent manner prior to the collision. We are not convinced. First, the evidence was relevant to the question of whether appellant was grossly negligent. Second, any error in admitting the evidence was harmless.
A violation of 191.5, subdivision (a), requires that the defendant cause the death of a human being while driving a vehicle under the influence of alcohol. The killing must also be either "the proximate result of the commission of an unlawful act, not amounting to a felony, and with gross negligence, or the proximate result of the commission of a lawful act that might produce death, in an unlawful manner, and with gross negligence." (§ 191.5, subd. (a).) In this context, gross negligence is "the exercise of so slight a degree of care as to raise a presumption of conscious indifference to the consequences. [Citation.] 'The state of mind of a person who acts with conscious indifference to the consequences is simply, "I don't care what happens." ' [Citation.] The test is objective: whether a reasonable person in the defendant's position would have been aware of the risk involved." (People v. Bennett (1991) 54 Cal.3d 1032, 1036.) The jury should "consider all relevant circumstances, " including the manner in which the defendant drove and his level of intoxication "to determine if the defendant acted with a conscious disregard of the consequences rather than with mere inadvertence." (Id. at p. 1038.)
Evidence that appellant was driving with a suspended license was relevant to the question of whether he acted in a grossly negligent manner. The suspension of appellant's driver's license informed him that he did not meet the minimum standards required to drive a vehicle in California. He ignored that judgment when he decided to drive on September 13, 2008, just as he ignored the risk posed by his alcohol and methamphetamine use. The trial court reasonably ruled that this was relevant to the issue of whether he was grossly negligent.
Even if the trial court erred in admitting the evidence, any error was harmless because the evidence of appellant's guilt was overwhelming. Appellant drove a car, while intoxicated with both alcohol and methamphetamine, at a high speed, across a center median and into a power pole. Moreover, no reasonable juror could have accepted the defense claim that appellant was not the driver, with or without evidence concerning the status of his driver's license. Appellant had a visible seat belt injury running from his left shoulder, across his chest, toward his right hip. Had he been a passenger, rather than the driver, his seat belt injury would have run in the opposite direction, from right to left. In addition, although the passenger side of the vehicle suffered catastrophic damage in the collision, appellant walked away with minor injuries that are completely inconsistent with his having been seated in the passenger side of the vehicle. Given this evidence, it is not reasonably probable that appellant would have achieved a more favorable result had the evidence of his suspended driver's license been excluded from the jury trial. (People v. Watson (1956) 46 Cla.2d 818.)
Conclusion
The judgment is affirmed.
We concur: GILBERT, P.J., COFFEE, J.