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| A deadly flag? |
By Charlie Buttrey
One evening, Justin Kuzawski was cutting boxes with a box-cutter. His girlfriend’s six-year-old daughter, no doubt the curious sort, kept persisting in asking Kuzawski what he was doing. Kuzawski thought it would be a good idea to hold the box cutter next to her stomach and tell her that he would kill her in her sleep.
It turns out that that was NOT a good idea.
In fact, Kuzawski ended up charged with three criminal offenses and, after a jury-waived trial, found himself convicted of first-degree aggravated domestic assault. On appeal, a closely-divided Court affirms his conviction.
In order to convict someone of first-degree aggravated domestic assault, the State must prove, beyond a reasonable doubt, among other things, that the defendant used a “deadly weapon.” Even innocuous things can become deadly weapons. So long as an object is used or is intended to be used in a manner to cause either death or serious bodily injury, that object is a deadly weapon. Just about any object—a ball-point pen, a baseball, a flower pot, a pillow—can become a deadly weapon. Heck, the spatula that I will use to cook an omelette once I finish this disarmingly entertaining (yet fascinating and enlightening) analysis could become a deadly weapon if, for instance, the weeks I have spent in quarantine with my spouse lead me to bonk her over the head with it repeatedly. But I digress.
A three-member majority concludes that the box-cutter is a “deadly weapon,” despite the fact that the box-cutter in this instance is a safety box-cutter; it has a molded plastic guard over its top edge, the sharp cutting edges are on the sides of the tool, and the plastic guard extends over these edges by approximately a centimeter. It cannot cut anything other than the side of a box. In fact, if you jammed the implement directly into someone’s stomach, the worst thing that would happen is that the person might get a little red mark from the force of the thrust, since the blade could not possibly penetrate the skin.
Here is a picture of the thing:
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| The "weapon" itself |
The majority insists that it still constitutes a “deadly weapon,” since “the determination of whether an object is a deadly weapon depends on an objective perception of the dangerousness of the object in question.” Since, objectively, the tool could be understood to have sharp edges, by extension, the majority concludes, like any other box cutter, it is “capable of producing death or serious bodily injury.”
Not that it’s of much consolation to Mr. Kuzawski, but Justices Robinson and Skoglund dissent. In so doing, they accuse the majority of engaging in rhetorical legerdemain, leaving a very large tail to wag a very small dog. Specifically, the minority posits that the majority’s reasoning means that “any use or threat to a family member that involves any object would be aggravated domestic assault with a deadly weapon.” For example, “A threat to hit a child’s backside with a pillow would qualify because the pillow could also be used to smother the child. Poking a sibling in the back with a small plastic pencil sharpener would qualify because you could stick someone’s finger in the slot and rotate the plastic casing. And threatening to poke a spouse in the belly with a manual can opener would qualify because you could close the cutting wheel on the tip of someone’s finger and then turn the cutting mechanism.”
And who knows what I could do with my spatula if the quarantine doesn’t end soon?
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