Appellant Robert Lorenzo Bostic was convicted of the felony murder of three-year-old Leonard Graham, Jr., with cruelty to a child in the first degree as the underlying felony.1 On appeal, Bostic contests the sufficiency of the evidence and takes issue with the trial court’s admission of certain photographs and its refusal to instruct the jury on the law of felony involuntary manslaughter. 1. The three-year-old victim was declared “brain-dead” on October 31, 2003, and was removed from life support care because there was no evidence of brain-stem function or other brain function. The cause of death was multiple blunt-force trauma consistent with shaken impact syndrome. The child had been transported to a hospital on October 30 after his mother found him unresponsive when she picked him up from the home shared by her sister and appellant, her sister’s boyfriend. Investigators ascertained that appellant was the child’s sole caregiver from 9:30 a.m. until 3:30 p.m. the day he was found unresponsive. Appellant told police in a video-recorded statement played for the jury that he had shaken the child “slightly hard” after the child had vomited, and the child’s head had hit the arm of a chair during the shaking incident. An autopsy revealed fresh external abrasions on the child and internal bruising behind the child’s ear, on the back of his neck and throughout his body, including two fractured ribs, multiple sites of sub-dural bleeding on the brain’s surface, as well as sub-arachnoid and petechial hemorrhaging.
Appellant presented evidence that a neighbor of the victim’s grandmother told a counselor in a drug treatment center that the neighbor had seen the child’s father shake the child the night of October 29 after the child had up-ended a plate containing cocaine. The neighbor testified and denied having made such statements and denied having seen the child’s father shake the child. Drug-screening tests administered to the child’s parents resulted in no evidence of drug usage. The forensic pathologist who performed the autopsy testified that, had the injuries been inflicted before 7 a.m. on October 30, the child would not have been acting normally at 8:15 a.m., when the child was dropped off at appellant’s home. Both the child’s mother and his aunt testified the child was acting normally when he was dropped off by his mother. The forensic pathologist and several other medical experts testified that the child’s closed-head injuries were the result of the child having been violently shaken by an adult-sized person. Medical experts opined that the injuries were painful to the child.
