People v. Williams.
2025 COA 26. No. 23CA0484. Affirmative Defenses—Involuntary Intoxication—Lay Witness Testimony by Law Enforcement.
March 13, 2025
Williams was seen walking through a neighborhood and shooting a gun. Police apprehended him, and he was still armed. Williams was taken to a hospital for an injured hand, where he spoke with Sergeant Sapp. According to Sergeant Sapp’s trial testimony, Williams said he was home with his mother and his children, and he was drinking alcohol. Williams claimed that he started “seeing and hearing people that nobody else saw,” so his mother left with his children. Williams reportedly then used cocaine but told Sapp that, based on the taste, it might have been methamphetamine. Williams also told Sapp that the people he saw were threatening and pursuing him, so he armed himself and began shooting at those people as he walked through the neighborhood. Williams also claimed that one of the people shot him and injured his hand. Williams was charged with three counts of attempted first degree murder, seven counts of menacing, six counts of child abuse, one count of criminal mischief, and one count of prohibited use of a weapon. He argued at trial that he acted in self-defense against the threatening people. He also tried unsuccessfully to raise an involuntary intoxication defense based on his intent to use cocaine that was actually methamphetamine. The jury did not reach a verdict on one attempted murder count; it acquitted Williams of the other two attempted murder counts and of one menacing count, and it convicted him of all other counts.
On appeal, Williams argued that the district court improperly refused to give an involuntary intoxication instruction based on his statement that the cocaine tasted like methamphetamine. To determine whether an involuntary intoxication instruction is warranted, a defendant must show that (1) a substance was introduced into their body; (2) the defendant took the substance pursuant to medical advice, did not know it was an intoxicant, or did not know it could act as an intoxicant; (3) the substance disturbed the defendant’s mental or physical capacities; and (4) ingestion of the substance resulted in the defendant’s inability to conform their conduct as required by law. In People v. Mion, 2023 COA 110M, ¶¶ 26, 42 (cert. granted Aug. 19, 2024), the court expanded the involuntary intoxication defense to include situations where a defendant ingests a known intoxicant but claims that a different intoxicant that they didn’t know was present caused the inability to conform their conduct to law. Here, Williams was not entitled to the instruction because while he presented evidence that a substance was introduced into his body, he failed to establish the remaining three factors. Further, there is no evidence about how much alcohol Williams drank, whether he felt drunk, or whether he could rule out alcohol as a cause of his hallucinations. Therefore, the district court did not err by not giving the requested instruction.
Williams also contended that the district court erroneously allowed two police officers to testify as lay witnesses, maintaining that they provided expert testimony. At trial, Officer Forrester identified shell casings found at the scene, and Officer Hallman identified the weapons recovered from the scene as including a Keltec 32 automatic handgun that took a 32-caliber handgun round. Here, even if the officers testified from their experiences as police officers, an ordinary person could deduce as a matter of logic that a 32-caliber gun fires 32-caliber ammunition, so the basis for the testimony was not so specialized or technical as to require expert testimony. This testimony could have helped the jury to understand that the guns took the types of ammunition recovered and to therefore assess Williams’s self-defense claim regarding other shooters. Thus, the scope of the testimony was lay opinion testimony under CRE 701. And even assuming the court erred, any error was harmless because the evidence against Williams was overwhelming.
The judgment of conviction was affirmed.