Conviction for driving over festival-goer upheld

By ANDREW WELLNER

Frontiersman.com

MAT-SU — A state appeals court on Wednesday upheld the conviction of a man who ran over a napping concertgoer at the 2009 Trapper Creek Bluegrass Festival.

The case against Rodney C. Humphrey had a lot of twists and turns. Humphrey ran over — and nearly killed — Texas resident Aaron Dorfman while driving through a field marked with no trespassing signs.

Witnesses from the festival, “testified that before Humphrey ran over Dorfman, Humphrey was pushing through the festival crowd, yelling at people that they were trespassing and did not belong there,” according to the ruling penned by J. Patrick Hanley, an Anchorage District Court judge filling in on the appeals court.

After the incident, Alaska State Troopers found Humphrey sleeping in a nearby cabin, and he blew a .202 on the Breathalyzer, which is nearly three times the .08 legal limit for driving.

Humphrey was eventually charged with assault, drunken driving, attempted murder, resisting arrest, driving without a license, and failure to render assistance to an injured person.

After his trial, Superior Court Judge Vanessa White agreed to acquit Humphrey on the resisting arrest charge. The jury convicted him on the driving without a license charge and for failing to render assistance, but couldn’t come up with a verdict on the other charges. The state decided to re-try Humphrey, but the case ended short of a second trial, with Humphrey agreeing to plead guilty to assault.

It’s the failure to render aid charge that Humphrey appealed, and his objections to his conviction had to do with his mental state.

Essentially, Humphrey wanted to argue that he wasn’t drunk when he ran over Dorfman, he always acted that way because he had suffered a traumatic brain injury.

“Judge White allowed Humphrey to present his father’s testimony on the behavioral effects of Humphrey’s brain injury to impeach the state’s evidence that Humphrey was intoxicated when he ran over Dorfman. But the judge prohibited Humphrey from mentioning ‘traumatic brain injury’ or from discussing how that injury affected his mental state,” Hanley wrote.

The reason White limited that evidence has to do with how Alaska’s laws on pleading insanity work.

“Once a defendant provides notice of his intent to raise a mental disease or defect defense, the trial court must appoint at least two qualified psychiatrists or forensic psychologists to examine the defendant and report on his mental conditions,” Hanley writes.

Because of that, prior written warning is required. And Humphrey didn’t provide that warning.

Humphrey argued that a traumatic brain injury wasn’t what the Legislature had in mind when it defined “mental disease or defect.” But he hadn’t raised that issue in the lower court, so the appeals court didn’t go for it.

Humphrey also argued that he only had to give notice if he was arguing that he was too insane or too incompetent to stand trial.

“This argument misapprehends the relationship between … the statute governing defense of insanity and … the statute that governs the admission of evidence of a defendant’s mental disease or defect,” Hanley writes.

Essentially, the judge said Humphrey was wrong, he still had to give notice.

“We therefore conclude that, given the evidence and the legal arguments presented here, the Superior Court correctly ruled that Humphrey was required to comply with the notice requirements of (the statutes),” Hanley writes.

Contact Andrew Wellner at 352-2270 or andrew.wellner@frontiersman.com.