People v. Dealba: A Panel from the Second District Makes an Unnecessary Mess of the Crime of Battery

Mr. Dealba was pissed at his ex because she attempted to switch their children to a different school.  While the ex was driving their kids in her VW beetle, Dealba pulled alongside and rammed the passenger side of his car into the driver's side of her beetle a couple of times.  The ex had to grab the steering wheel tightly to resist her beetle veering into cars parked on the roadside.

At trial Dealba went down on assault with a deadly weapon, the car, and domestic battery.  On appeal, the issue is whether substantial evidence supported the battery charge.  Dealba argued that he did not touch his ex, his car did not touch his ex (his car touched her car); therefore there was no touching, and without a touching there can be no battery.  

The panel disagrees and affirms the battery count.  Their conclusion is correct, but their reasoning is ill-thought out and will create problems.  They could and should have gone with a more straight-forward analysis.  

The panel's mistake is to take Dealba's bait of skipping from the language in the statute (the law) to the jury instructions (not the law).  In California, battery is the "willful and unlawful use of force . . . upon the person of another."  Force is the vector product of mass and acceleration.  When Dealba rammed his car into that of his ex, he used force upon her.  Any high school physics student knows this (If I pick up a carrycot containing a baby and swing the carrycot, I am exerting force upon the baby, even if the baby remains in the same position within the carrycot.).  It should have been game over at this point.  

The model jury instruction for battery uses the word "touching" in place of force.  It is a semantic substitution intended to make the element of force more understandable to lay juries.  But this substitution is unnecessary for purposes of statutory analysis by jurists.  All the statute requires is force.  And when one car hits another and leaves tire marks and scratches upon the exterior of the rammed car, force has been applied to the rammed car and those inside it my fine justices.

Instead of leaving it at that, this panel unwisely ignores the obvious force in ramming the car and instead finds the ex was "touched" by Dealba when his ramming caused her car to convert the force from the ramming into increased torque on the steering wheel she was holding and that this increase in the force required to keep the wheel straight was the actual battery.

Not only is this extra step logically unnecessary, it is dangerous.  If the ex had taken her hands off the steering wheel when Dealba was ramming her car, wouldn't she still be a victim of a battery?  By the panel's reasoning, the answer is  gelastically "no".