Recent court rulings

Poklemba’s feelings happen to be shared by two Florida appellate courts that in recent months disagreed with how the Gonzalez case was handled.

An Orlando-based appeals court just ruled against a felon convicted of attempted manslaughter for trying to use a car “as a battering ram against an officer.” The defendant argued that a car is not a weapon.

The judges there used this logic: “Just as an automobile’s primary purpose is for transportation, the primary purpose of a steak knife or baseball bat is for use as cutlery or sporting equipment. Yet no one could reasonably dispute that those items are also ‘commonly understood’ as ‘instrument[s] for combat against another person’ when used as such.”

Similarly, an appeals court that reviewed and upheld Adam Shepard’s 2015 manslaughter with a weapon conviction in Duval County found that a car used to strike another man “constitutes a weapon in the common and ordinary meaning of the word.”

Specifically, the appellate court based in Tallahassee cited the American Heritage College Dictionary’s 1993 alternate definition of a weapon as a “means used to defend against or defeat another.”

Associate Judge John T. Brown explained that cars, like kitchen knives and baseball bats, can become weapons even though they aren’t designed that way – despite what the other appeals court concluded.

Duval prosecutors had charged Shepard with premeditated first-degree murder, for allegedly driving his Acura over a Jacksonville Beach man after a bar fight in 2011. For a murder count, there’s no gray area in the law as to whether cars can be considered deadly weapons.

But the jury opted for the lesser charge of manslaughter, with the finding that the car was a weapon. That elevated the crime from a second-degree felony to a first-degree felony, which carries a stiffer penalty. The defense, which argued 35-year-old Spencer Schott’s death was a tragic accident, now wants the Supreme Court to sort it out.

The state Attorney General’s Office has agreed the high court should get involved because one appeals court “concluded that a car is not a weapon, and (one court) concluded that a car is a weapon.”

Assistant Attorney Generals Trisha M. Pate and Kaitlin R. Weiss last month noted that the cases had nearly identical facts.

“Both victims were killed after leaving bars and being deliberately struck by a car. Both defendants were convicted of manslaughter and leaving the scene of an accident,” the lawyers wrote.

Motorists can still be charged with murder if they used their cars to purposely plow into innocent people. But there has to be clear evidence the act was premeditated or intentional — in some cases, running over someone multiple times still might not rise to a murder charge.

“You have to have clear intent to charge it as murder,” said former Palm Beach County prosecutor Ellen Roberts, who specialized in DUI manslaughter and vehicular homicide crimes. “What can the state prove?”

Matthew Kachergus, attorney for the man convicted in Duval, says he hopes his client can eventually get 15 years knocked off his punishment by convincing the Supreme Court that cars can’t be defined as weapons for manslaughter charges.

“This is an important issue of law which recurs on a frequent basis throughout courts in the state,” he said.

Manslaughter with a weapon statistics from the Florida Department of Law Enforcement, from 1996 to 2016, show the number of offenses with firearms and knives, but everything else falls under a category called “other.”

There is no readily available breakdown of the number of times that prosecutors said a car was used as a weapon.