A woman who put a comforter over her crying 2-year-old son’s face until he passed out and then left him alone for 19 hours did not evince the “wickedness” necessary to sustain a depraved indifference murder conviction, a unanimous upstate appellate panel has held.
The Appellate Division, Fourth Department, in People v. Santiago, 07-02489, reduced the defendant’s second-degree murder conviction to second-degree manslaughter. The Dec. 28 decision was the second in seven days in which the justices in Rochester upset convictions where the prosecution could not establish legal depravity. One week earlier, in People v. Jean-Philippe, 08-02474, a Fourth Department panel said a man who had led police on a high-speed chase in traffic, ran several red lights and collided with several vehicles behaved recklessly, but not with the malevolence to meet the ever-evolving definition of depraved indifference.
