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Criminal Law Keyed to Dressler
State v. Hernandez
Facts
The victim, Cecil Barrymore, was killed in a motor vehicle accident caused by the Defendant. The victim and Kevin Butcher were passengers in a truck driven by Robert Butcher. Robert Butcher first noticed the Defendant’s van as it rounded a curve traveling in the opposite direction as the truck containing the three men. The Defendant’s van slid into the wrong lane of travel, and two of its wheels were off the ground. Butcher applied the brakes and drove his truck as far to the right as he could. The Defendant’s van returned to its own lane but then came back into Butcher’s lane and collided with the truck. The truck was knocked into a ditch running alongside the roadway, and the van overturned in an adjacent field. The Defendant was thrown from the van. The Defendant told a person on the scene rendering aid that he had drunk “a 12-pack and some whiskey.” The victim was pronounced dead at the scene. At trial, evidence, in the form of stickers and pins attached to the visor of th e defendant’s van containing “drinking slogans” was introduced to show that the defendant knew that imbibing alcohol negatively affected his driving skills and that he approved of excessive drinking. The defendant appealed his conviction of involuntary manslaughter on the ground that the admitted evidence was irrelevant to the charges against him.
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