Whipped Cream Difficulties

When does a murder take place?

In many cases, that’s an easy question to answer; the victim is DRT¹ or ADASTW².

But in some cases, you run into a situation where the victim is wounded, and dies of their injuries at a later date. The law on this varies from state to state; common law held that a death resulting from injuries inflicted during a specific act was murder if it occurred within a year and a day of the act. So if I beat someone badly, and they died 364 days later, that could be prosecuted as murder; if they died 367 days later, it could only be prosecuted as assault. According to Wikipedia, many jurisdictions in the United States have abolished the year and a day rule. California has apparently changed it to a three day and year rule.

But there’s an additional level of complexity to this, which comes up as the result of an article in today’s Statesman about the sad and awful case of Robert Middleton.

Robert Middleton was eight years old on June 28, 1998. He was going to see a friend of his when an older boy, Donald Wilburn Collins (who was 13 at the time) grabbed him, tied him to a tree, poured gasoline on him, and set him on fire. Middleton was burned over 95 percent of his body.

Middleton was treated by the Shriners at their burn institute in Galveston and went through more than 200 surgeries, including skin grafts.

Robert Middleton died a year ago today (April 29th, 2011) at the age of 20. The cause of death was squamous cell carcinoma, which is believed to have been a result of the skin grafts he received, and his death certificate shows the cause of death as “homicide” resulting from his injuries.

The Middleton family sued Donald Collins in civil court, and won a judgment against him of $150 billion dollars. Collins did not attempt to defend himself in the civil case; he is currently in prison on charges unrelated to the Middleton case. (Collins was convicted of sexual assault of an 8-year old boy when he was 16, and did time in the Texas Youth Commission for that offense. Collins has also been convicted of theft and resisting arrest, and of failure to register as a sex offender. His current sentence is for failure to comply with the requirements of the sex offender registry. Middleton also accused Collins of raping him two weeks before the gasoline attack.)

For various reasons, the Middleton case was not prosecuted at the time:

[Montgomery County Attorney David] Walker said it’s his understanding that “there were some significant difficulties because Robbie Middleton was damaged so severely and so traumatically.” Walker also said it’s his understanding that Middleton implicated “folks that it was later shown were not responsible.’ ” Colleen Middleton acknowledges that her son was in no condition to be of much help before the three-year statute of limitations ran out on possible charges stemming from what was then a nonfatal attack. There is no statute of limitations on murder.

I was reading the print edition of the HouChron daily while this was going on, and followed the case closely. One thing that is left out of discussions of the case (except for the brief allusion above), but which I clearly remember; the police actually arrested another boy before they arrested Collins. The other boy was let go within 24 hours, after a bunch of folks who knew him came forward and said “He’s a good kid; he couldn’t have done this.” (And it turned out that the other boy was also fishing in a creek several miles away at the time of the attack, with a bunch of other kids and his adult Scoutmaster.) That other boy’s name was never released, as I recall; however, Collins name was released not too long after the arrest, even though he was a juvenile.

Anyway, the gist of the legal battle is this: County Attorney Walker wants to prosecute Collins on murder charges. And specifically, he wants to date the murder as having taken place April 29, 2011, the date Middleton died. Why? That way, he can prosecute Collins as an adult for the murder. If Walker goes back to the actual date of the attack (June 28, 1998) Collins was 13 at the time; Walker’s other option is to get a court to agree that Collins should be tried as an adult now for a crime committed as a juvenile in 1998, which seems to me to be a long shot. (Though this is not unheard of; Michael Skakel is perhaps the most famous example of this, but the lawyers still seem to be wrangling over whether he should have been tried as an adult.)

The question is now in the hands of the Attorney General, Greg Abbot, and things are pretty much on hold until he issues a ruling.

Meanwhile, Collins is set to be released from prison in September of this year, barring any new developments.

¹ Dead Right There.

² Arrived Dead And Stayed That Way.