## Facts

- Gordon L. White owned a three-family residential building in New Britain, Connecticut.
- On December 25, 1982, a slow-burning electrical fire began smoldering in a second-floor wall outlet where a quartz heater was plugged in, later producing heavy smoke.
- Firefighters found a second-floor tenant, Maryann Jones, and her two young children dead in the apartment; the medical examiner determined death by smoke-inhalation asphyxia.
- The building had no smoke detectors; evidence indicated detectors likely would have warned the occupants in time to escape.
- Earlier in 1982, White received notice from a fire marshal (in another town) requiring smoke detectors in a different multifamily property he owned; he installed detectors there but not in the New Britain building.
- The state charged White with three counts of criminally negligent homicide and three counts of failing to provide smoke detectors under cited statutes and Fire Safety Code provisions.
- A jury convicted White on all counts; the trial court imposed a total effective sentence of one year (suspended), three years of probation, and a fine.
- White appealed, challenging the validity and enforceability of the smoke-detector requirements and the use of the omission as the basis for homicide liability.

## Issues

1. Whether the Fire Safety Code provisions and related statutes requiring smoke detectors were unconstitutionally vague as applied, denying fair notice for penal enforcement.
2. Whether the Fire Safety Code provisions mandating smoke detectors exceeded the authority granted by the enabling statute.
3. Whether failure to install smoke detectors, as charged here, could legally and constitutionally support convictions for criminally negligent homicide.

## Decision

- The Connecticut Supreme Court found error, reversed the judgment of conviction on all counts, and remanded.
- The court held that the statutory and regulatory scheme, as applied, did not clearly impose a criminally enforceable duty to install smoke detectors in the defendant’s pre-existing three-family dwelling.
- Because the smoke-detector violation counts could not stand, the homicide convictions—predicated on the same alleged omission and regulatory duty—also could not stand.

## Legal Principles

- Penal statutes and regulations must be sufficiently definite to give a person of ordinary intelligence fair notice of what conduct is prohibited or required.
- Ambiguity in a penal regulatory scheme, particularly regarding whether obligations apply to existing buildings versus new construction, is resolved in the defendant’s favor (rule of lenity).
- Administrative regulations may not expand criminal liability beyond what the legislature has clearly authorized in the enabling statute.
- Criminal homicide liability cannot be grounded on a regulatory duty that is not clearly and validly imposed for criminal enforcement; the state may not bootstrap an unclear or unauthorized code obligation into a homicide conviction.

## Conclusion

The court reversed White’s convictions because the Fire Safety Code and related statutes, as applied to his existing three-family building, did not provide clear, legislatively authorized notice of a criminally enforceable duty to retrofit smoke detectors; without a valid predicate duty, the related criminally negligent homicide counts failed as well.


State v. White, 204 Conn. 410, 528 A.2d 811 (Conn. 1987)