Smith's Criminal Case Compendium
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State v. Buck, COA23-606, ___ N.C. App. ___ (May. 7, 2024)
In this New Hanover County case, defendant appealed his convictions for assault with a deadly weapon with the intent to kill inflicting serious injury (AWDWIKISI), felony hit-and-run with serious injury, and robbery with a dangerous weapon, making several arguments centered around the definition of “crash” under G.S. 20-166, the mutually exclusive nature of the AWDWIKISI and hit-and-run charges, and a clerical error in the judgment. The Court of Appeals found no merit with defendant’s arguments regarding his convictions, but did find that the trial court made a clerical error in the hit-and-run judgment and remanded for correction of that error.
In January of 2021, defendant met the victim to sell him marijuana; instead of paying defendant for the marijuana, the victim grabbed the drugs and ran. Defendant hit the victim with his car, got out of the vehicle and went through the victim’s pockets, then drove away without calling for assistance.
Defendant argued that “crash” as used in the section defining a hit-and-run (G.S. 20-166) could not refer to an intentional action because it was the same as an “accident.” To support this argument, defendant pointed to the definition section G.S. 20-4.01(4c), defining “crash” and including the following language: “[t]he terms collision, accident, and crash and their cognates are synonymous.” Rejecting defendant’s interpretation, the Court of Appeals explained “[t]he General Assembly chose not to discriminate between intended events and unintended events; therefore, so long as there is injury caused by a motor vehicle— intent is irrelevant.” Slip Op. at 6-7. After the court established that defendant could be charged with hit-and-run for an intentional action, it dispensed with defendant’s argument regarding his AWDWIKISI charge, explaining “[c]onvictions of AWDWIKISI and felony hit and run with serious injury are not mutually exclusive because assault is intentional, and a ‘crash’ can also be intentional.” Id. at 10. Based on this reasoning, the court rejected defendant’s various challenges to his convictions.
Moving to the clerical error, the court acknowledged that the judgment finding defendant guilty of hit-and-run referenced G.S. 20-166 subsection “(E)” instead of the appropriate “(a)” for his conviction. The court remanded to allow correction of the clerical error.