High Court Rules State of Mind Must Be Proved in ‘Depraved’ Murder Cases
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ALBANY – A high court ruling that a New York City man did not show “depraved indifference” when he unintentionally blew up his apartment in a bungled suicide attempt could make it harder to convict murderers, the state’s chief judge said yesterday.
At issue is whether a former administrative law judge, Larry Feingold, knew what might happen in 2003 when he sealed his 12th floor Manhattan apartment with tape, blew out the pilot lights of his stove, turned up the gas, and took tranquilizers to await his asphyxiation.
A spark from the refrigerator a few hours later caused an explosion that blew out the apartment’s walls, damaged several neighboring apartments, and rained shattered glass onto the ground below. Mr. Feingold was injured, but lived. No one else was hurt.
The Court of Appeals decided 4-3 to reduce Mr. Feingold’s felony conviction of first-degree reckless endangerment to a misdemeanor because he didn’t act with “depraved indifference” to others, according to the decision released yesterday.
“That a large number of people were endangered does not mean that defendant was depravedly indifferent, particularly when [the trial judge] went to great pains to say the opposite,” Judge George Bundy Smith wrote for the majority.
“Given the trial judges’ findings, we cannot affirm the conviction because we cannot conceive that a person may be guilty of a depraved indifference crime without being depravedly indifferent.”
Under state law, a person is guilty of reckless endangerment “when under circumstances evincing a depraved indifference to human life, he recklessly engages in conduct which creates a grave risk of death to another person.” The same language is used in the state’s depraved indifference murder law.
A Manhattan Supreme Court justice, Jeffrey Atlas, who presided over the trial, said Mr. Feingold “was a plainly depressed individual, who committed an extremely reckless and foolish act not because of his lack of regard for the lives of others but because of his focus on his troubles and himself.”
Justice Atlas said he nonetheless found Mr. Feingold guilty based on earlier Court of Appeals decisions stating depraved indifference was meant not to define a person’s mental state, but “the actual setting in which the risk creating conduct occurred” and the danger it presented.
