According to recent opinion issued by the D.C. Court of Appeals, Darrell Jones v. United States, __ A.3d __ (D.C. 2025), the defense must prove “incapacitating intoxication” in order to negate the mens rea element of a criminal offense.
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“Voluntary intoxication” is generally not a viable defense to a criminal charge in Washington, D.C.
As Joshua Dressler puts it in my favorite treatise on criminal law, Understanding Criminal Law, “Anglo-American common law has provided wrongdoers very little opportunity to avoid conviction on the basis of intoxication, and the modern legislative trend is to reduce the scope of any intoxication defense still further.”
The idea is that a person who makes the voluntary decision to ingest alcohol, drugs or other intoxicating substances should be held accountable for that decision.
That said, there are certain instances in which voluntary intoxication can be used as a possible defense to criminal charges.
This was the situation addressed by the D.C. Court of Appeals decision in Jones.
Mr. Jones was charged, among other things, with Assault With Intent to Kill (AWIK). This is a “specific intent” crime.
Unlike a “general intent” crime, in which the government must prove only that the defendant intended to commit the physical act itself, a “specific intent crime” requires proof that the defendant acted with a particular purpose or objective. Fitzgerald v. United States, 228 A.3d 429, 439 (D.C. 2020). In the case of AWIK, the required state of mind is the intent to kill someone.
The defendant in Jones sought to testify that both he and the decedent had been smoking PCP moments before the fatal stabbing and that “his extreme intoxication rendered him incapable of forming the specific intent to kill [the decedent] because he had effectively disassociated from the reality around him.”
If the jury accepted this defense, the required mens rea would have been missing and the jury would have had no choice but to acquit Jones of this offense.
Responding to the government’s opposition to this evidence, the trial court precluded Jones from introducing any evidence of PCP use unless it was accompanied by expert testimony elucidating PCP’s effects.
This ruling, the Court of Appeals concluded, was erroneous. Specifically, it differentiated the fact pattern in this case from Jackson v. United States, 210 A.3d 800 (D.C. 2019), the case the trial court had cited in arriving at its conclusion:
First, and most importantly, Jones himself sought to offer direct testimony about the effects PCP had on him on the night in question, so there was no need for expert testimony to link that PCP use to the relevant questions in the case. Second, Jones sought to introduce evidence that both he and [the decedent] had smoked PCP in the minutes before he attacked [the decedent], not many hours earlier, so there was nothing particularly speculative in positing that he and [the decedent] would remain under the drug’s effects so shortly after smoking it. Third, Jones was the proponent of the PCP evidence, so that the prejudicial effects that evidence would have on him should have been entirely discounted from the Rule 403 calculus.
That said, the Court of Appeals confirmed that the bar to using the voluntary intoxication defense is still a “high one”: “A defendant’s voluntary intoxication may negate the mens rea element of specific intent crimes only if the defendant has reached a point of incapacitating intoxication.”
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Judge Rainey Brandt presided at trial. Mr. Jones was represented at trial by Wole Falodun and on appeal by Sean Day.
