State v. Fields

“Serious physical injury” means physical injury which creates a substantial risk of death or which causes serious and protracted disfigurement, protracted impairment of health or protracted loss or impairment of the function of any bodily organ.

On appeal for the conviction of multiple crimes, Defendant confronts only the conviction for second-degree assault. Defendant assigns error to the trial court’s denial of his motion for judgement of acquittal (MJOA), arguing that the State failed to present ample evidence that his actions satisfied the “serious physical injury” element of second-degree assault. The statute defines “serious physical injury” as “physical injury which creates a substantial risk of death or which causes serious and protracted disfigurement, protracted impairment of health . . . .” ORS 161.015(8). The Court notes that in previous sentencing cases, the definitive question asked was “whether the victim had suffered ‘significant physical injury.’” The court looked to State v. Drew, 302 Or App 232, 248-49, 460 P3d 1032 (2020), which held that the victim had suffered a “significant visible injury” where the scar was six inches long, ran up from the forehead and onto the scalp, and required “five staples to close and was described as large and highly visible” reasoning that, when focusing on residual scars, characteristics such as a scar’s proportions and location provide insight to the seriousness of the injury. The case at hand concerns an injury to the victim’s forehead which left a one to two-centimeter-long scar. Though the seriousness of an injury is not determined by the length of a victim’s scar, no reasonable factfinder using the evidence presented here would conclude that a two-centimeter-long scar would amount to “serious” under ORS 161.015(8). Therefore, the trial court erred in its dismissal of defendant’s MJOA. Reversed and remanded.