People v. Valentín Acevedo
People v. Valentín Acevedo
Opinion of the Court
Appellant, having been convicted by a jury of two charges of assault with intent to commit murder, and of driving a vehicle under the influence of intoxicating liquor and without a license (§ 218 of the Penal Code and §§ 5-801 and 3-301 of the Vehicle and Traffic Law — 33 L.P.R.A. § 732; 9 L.P.R.A. §§ 1041 and 721), was sentenced to serve from 10 to 15 years in the penitentiary on each one of the felonies and to imprisonment in jail for the offense of driving under the influence of intoxicating liquor, because of the aggravating circumstances of a subsequent offense. Since December 1965 his driver’s license had been suspended.
Appellant assigns as errors that:
(1) The verdicts returned by the jury are contrary to the evidence introduced.
(2) There was not sufficient evidence to support that appellant was guilty of driving a motor vehicle in a state of intoxication.
(3) The penalties of imprisonment were excessive, since there was no evidence of aggravating circumstances and
(4) It was an error to deny the motion for a new trial in the three causes appealed from.
The testimony of the eyewitnesses showed that during the night and until the time at which the facts occurred appellant passed some four times along the road in front of the store of Mislael Matías Pérez, in the ward Borinquen of Aguadilla, driving a Chevrolet vehicle; every time he went by he stopped and uttered insults and obscene words, from the car or after alighting from the same. On one of these occasions he began to urinate in front of the store where Mislael Matías Pérez, his wife, his parents, and two brothers were tidying up and closing the business at that moment. While he urinated he continued uttering insults and obscene words challenging someone to interrupt him from urinating or to kill him. While Mislael, his wife, Victor Manuel Matías Pérez, and next to
The witness Marta Rivera, Mislael’s wife, testified that appellant “Seemed drunk from the way he talked and from the manner he was driving the car. . . . Because of the words he talked. ... He was talking dirty and you could tell that he was drunk. . . . He.went by in the car from one side to the .other zig-zagging along the road. ... He swerved from where he was, instead of going straight, he swerved from the right.” The injured, Victor Manuel Matías Pérez, testified that they disregarded the offenses which appellant was uttering because “We already knew him. He used to do that”; that appellant was driving the vehicle “zig-zagging and fast”; that he was drunk “In the manner of driving and talking”; that he talked “As though he was drunk . . .”; that he noticed that “He was dirty and that” in his talk. Vidal Matías Pérez testified that appellant uttered his insults to him; that he did not do anything “Because I knew him, he was drunk” referring to appellant, due to “The way in which he was talking. . . .
When he saw that Victor was wounded; Mislael went into the business, took a revolver to shoot at appellant but his wife deflected the weapon and one of the shots wounded his father. As soon as the collision occurred appellant ran away but some people beat him and took away his shirt. :
Appellant testified that the night of the events he went to visit a man who lived near the business owned by' Mislael Matías in relation to a business matter. He parked his auto-, mobile in frdnt of Mislael’s store. Upon coming back “I could not move my car away . . . then I had to move backwards a little . . . and I hit a boy of 14' or 20 years.” Even though he was looking backwards he did not see him. He triéd to get out of the' car and everybody beat him, destroying his clothes. He was hospitalized for twenty-five days. He denied that he had stopped to urinate. To questions made by the prosecuting attorney he testified that he' did not go to the authorities to file a complaint on account of the injuries received; that at that time he did not have a driver’s license because it had been cancelled when he was found guilty of an offense of driving in a state of intoxication, in subsequent degree.
Several photographs of the scene of events and of appellant’s vehicle were admitted, showing that as. a. result of the collision against the wall of the store in question the vehicle had suffered dents on the left side over the rear bumper plus the breaking of the little light on the far left of the four with which the vehicle is equipped over said bumper.
Appellant argues that the deliberate intent to kill does not appear from the evidence nor was it established that appellant was driving under the influence of intoxicating liquor, that assuming that he was intoxicated he could not conceive in his mind the intent to kill; that the evidence would have rather justified a verdict of assault and battery (aggravated or simple); that it rather tended to charge appellant with a violation of § 5-201 and of § 5-505 of the Vehicle and Traffic Law. He indicates that the penalties are excessive and for those reasons the trial court erred in denying the motion for a new trial. We do not agree.
We said in People v. Méndez, 74 P.R.R. 853 (1953) that
“The concept of malice aforethought implies the absence of just cause or excuse in taking life and implies in addition the existence of the intent to kill a fellow creature. That intent may be manifested through one of the two following elements, either of which is sufficient to determine the existence of malice aforethought, to wit, (a) the specific intent to kill, considered as equivalent to the desire and direct, explicit, and defined purpose to kill, that is, formulated precisely with the direct objective to kill [citation], or, (b) the intention to do an act or inflict great bodily injury whose probable consequence is the death of a person.”
Under the circumstances of the case we are not justified in disturbing the discretion of the trial court in fixing the term of the penalties and in denying the granting of a new trial.
Therefore, the judgments rendered in this case by the Superior Court, Aguadilla Part, on November 24, 1967 will be affirmed.
Case-law data current through December 31, 2025. Source: CourtListener bulk data.