OPINION: A jury's most difficult question: intent

Fred Klein, former head of the Major Offense Bureau for the Nassau district attorney's office, is a visiting assistant professor at Hofstra Law School.

By now, the terrible details of the last night of Marcelo Lucero's life are well known. Jeffrey Conroy, the teenager convicted this week of killing him, now awaits sentencing in the crime. And some in the community now struggle to understand the jury's verdict: manslaughter as a hate crime, instead of murder.

Under our criminal law, the killing of one person by another is not necessarily murder - or even a crime. Many people who are killed in automobile crashes die accidentally, without anyone being criminally responsible. If a killer was acting reasonably to protect his own life, he also would not be criminally responsible.

Even if a crime was committed, however, the severity of the charge depends on the killer's mental state at the time of the crime. What was the killer's purpose in committing the act that caused the death? What was his intent?

If the killer's purpose or intent was to cause serious physical injury, he would be guilty of manslaughter in the first degree, punishable by up to 25 years in prison. On the other hand, if his purpose was to cause death, he would be guilty of murder in the second degree, punishable by life in prison. The more severe penalty is reserved for the intent - or conscious objective - to end the victim's life.

Distinguishing between intent to cause injury and intent to end someone's life is one of the most difficult tasks that jurors undertake. Indeed, each day of their deliberations, the jury in the Conroy case asked for the legal definition of intent. Their job was to figure out whether Conroy's purpose in stabbing Lucero was merely to hurt him or instead to end his life.

It's not as simple as saying, "He used a knife to stab him, so he must have intended to kill him." Juries deciding such cases must consider: At what part of the body was the knife aimed? How many times was the victim stabbed? What did the killer say and do before and after the stabbing? Did the killer have a specific motive or reason to end the victim's life, as opposed to hurt him?

The jurors in the Conroy case were properly instructed by the trial judge that to convict him of murder, they had to be convinced from the evidence of his intent to kill Lucero "beyond a reasonable doubt."

What did they have to work with?

First, Lucero was stabbed in the chest, a location far more likely to cause death than, say, an arm or a leg. That would be one indication that Conroy meant to kill Lucero.

But the other evidence didn't seem to be consistent with that conclusion. It appears that Lucero was stabbed only once, and he did not die immediately. If Conroy's purpose in stabbing Lucero was to kill him, he could have stabbed Lucero multiple times, rather than leaving him alive and mobile.

Instead, the evidence indicated that prompt and effective medical treatment could still have saved Lucero's life, despite the stab wound to his chest.

Moreover, none of the witnesses testified that Conroy had expressed any intent to kill Lucero - or anyone else - before the stabbing. In fact, this group had committed several other racially motivated attacks without killing or even stabbing any of the other victims. Nor did Conroy tell police that he wanted Lucero to die, although by his own testimony he was attempting to take the weight for the incident.

Given the equivocal nature of the testimony establishing what was on Conroy's mind at the time of the stabbing - either injury or death - together with the heavy standard of proof required for a murder conviction, one thing is clear: Despite the emotional nature of the crime and the heavy media attention, these jurors did their job and followed the law.