## Facts

- Christine Hopkins worked at a small hotel in Seattle and owned an automobile.
- An intoxicated acquaintance met Hopkins at the hotel, and Hopkins permitted him to drive her car while she rode as a passenger.
- Witnesses described the car as being driven erratically and recklessly, including traveling on the wrong side of the road.
- The Hopkins vehicle collided with another car, killing a passenger, Lois Ames.
- After the collision, an apparently intoxicated man was seen near the Hopkins car and then disappeared.
- Hopkins gave conflicting or evasive statements about the man’s identity and whereabouts and minimized his role as driver; she admitted having consumed “two or three drinks” earlier.
- The State’s theory was that the intoxicated man drove, Hopkins knew he was intoxicated, and she aided and abetted his reckless driving, which proximately caused Ames’s death.

## Issues

1. Whether the evidence was sufficient to convict Hopkins of manslaughter on an aiding-and-abetting theory based on permitting an intoxicated person to drive her car recklessly, resulting in death.
2. Whether, under Washington law abolishing the distinction between principals and accessories before the fact, Hopkins could be charged and convicted as a principal for aiding and abetting.
3. Whether the charging information and jury instructions were legally sufficient and free from prejudicial error.

## Decision

- The Washington Supreme Court affirmed the judgment of conviction.
- The court held the evidence was sufficient for the jury to find that an intoxicated person drove Hopkins’s car recklessly and that Hopkins knowingly aided and abetted that conduct, causing the death.
- The court held Hopkins was properly chargeable and punishable as a principal under the statute treating aiders and abettors as principals.
- The court found the information and the jury instructions, read as a whole, adequately stated the charge and governing law and did not warrant reversal.

## Legal Principles

- A person who aids and abets the commission of a felony may be prosecuted and punished as a principal where the jurisdiction’s statutes eliminate the accessory-before-the-fact versus principal distinction.
- Circumstantial evidence may support a finding that a defendant knowingly participated in, or knowingly acquiesced in, unlawful conduct sufficient for accomplice liability.
- A vehicle owner who knowingly permits an intoxicated person to drive and remains with that person while the vehicle is driven recklessly may be held criminally responsible for a resulting homicide on an aiding-and-abetting theory.

## Conclusion

The court upheld Hopkins’s manslaughter conviction because the jury could reasonably infer from the circumstances that she knowingly allowed an intoxicated person to drive her car recklessly and thereby aided and abetted conduct that proximately caused a fatal collision, and Washington law permitted her conviction as a principal.


State v. Hopkins, 147 Wash. 198 (1928)