No. 104 People v Keith Antwine

In April 2003, Keith Antwine stole a Chevy Blazer that the driver left idling in front of a store near
187th Street and Crotona Avenue in the Bronx. The driver's two children, three and nine years old, were in the back seat. Antwine abandoned the vehicle a short time later at 189th Street and Beaumont Avenue, and he was arrested nearby. After booking, a police officer took Antwine to St. Barnabas Hospital for treatment of a hernia and toothache, handcuffing his wrist to a bed in the emergency room. Antwine complained the cuffs were too tight and, when the officer tried to adjust them, he pulled free and ran away. The officer chased him down a hallway and grabbed him briefly, but he squirmed away and fled down a second hallway toward an exit. The officer tackled him just inside the doors and held him until help arrived.

At trial, Antwine moved to reduce a charge of second degree escape to attempted escape, arguing that he did not complete an escape because he was apprehended before he got out of the building. Supreme Court denied the motion and Antwine was convicted of the escape charge, as well as fourth degree grand larceny and two counts of endangering the welfare of a child. He was sentenced to two to four years in prison.

The Appellate Division, First Department affirmed, holding there was legally sufficient evidence that
Antwine was guilty of second degree escape. Penal Law § 205.10(2) states that a defendant commits the crime when, "having been arrested for ... a class C, class D or class E felony, he escapes from custody." Penal Law § 205.00(2) defines "custody" as "restraint by a public servant pursuant to an authorized arrest or an order of a court."

The court said the jury "could rationally have concluded ... that defendant broke away from the officer, not once but twice, and got free in the hospital hallway, albeit for a short period of time and, thus, was guilty of escape in the second degree.... We decline to adopt defendant's position that because he did not get out of the hospital, failing, in the officer's testimony, by only a few feet, and was not recaptured in a different location, there was legally insufficient evidence to support a conviction of escape in the second degree. The law, as we view it, does not impose a crossing-the-threshold standard upon the prosecution and, to the extent that the Fourth Department's decision in People v Neely (248 AD2d 996 [1998]) ... is to the contrary, we decline to follow it...."

Antwine relies on Neely, involving a defendant who fled the courtroom after he was sentenced. "His
attempt [to escape] was unsuccessful, however; he was apprehended on the same floor of the courthouse by court officers," the Fourth Department said, and it reduced his conviction from second degree escape to attempted escape. Antwine says the First Department's interpretation "would yield absurd results like finding that the defendant ... had committed a completed escape simply by breaking physical contact with the officer guarding him for a split second." He says, "[T]he rule suggested by the Fourth Department -- that a person being detained in custody inside a building must ordinarily manage to make it out of that building in order to be guilty of a completed escape -- is an appropriate and clearly defined rule that would most closely comport with the commonly understood meaning of the word 'escape....'"