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Appeals court clarifies defendants’ ability to claim they unknowingly ingested drugs

By Michael Karlik March 14, 2025 | updated 5 months ago

Colorado’s second-highest court clarified on Thursday that not every criminal defendant’s claim that they mistakenly ingested a different drug than the drug they thought they were taking will enable them to argue they were “involuntarily intoxicated.”

An El Paso County jury convicted Karl Jeran Friday Williams in 2022 after he walked through a Colorado Springs neighborhood shooting a gun. He received seven years in prison.

A sheriff’s deputy testified at trial that Williams had been drinking alcohol when he allegedly started “seeing and hearing people that nobody else saw.” Williams then ingested cocaine but it “didn’t taste right” and could have actually been methamphetamine. Subsequently, Williams walked out and began shooting at the alleged people he saw.

In Colorado, involuntary intoxication is an affirmative defense, meaning the prosecution would need to disprove at least some portion of the defense in order for jurors to convict. District Court Judge Michael McHenry declined to give Williams’ jurors the instruction because he found no evidence supported the idea Williams was involuntarily intoxicated with meth instead of cocaine.

On appeal, Williams invoked a recent Court of Appeals decision on the subject. In People v. Mion, the defendant claimed he accepted a joint from a friend, but soon afterward behaved aggressively and screamed at officers to shoot him. The defendant believed the joint was actually synthetic marijuana that can cause serious side effects.

In that 2023 decision, the Court of Appeals agreed the defendant was entitled to an involuntary intoxication instruction because some evidence did suggest the joint was laced with another substance. Specifically, the defendant noted he had never acted that way on marijuana before, an officer testified that the defendant appeared to be under the influence of a stimulant, and it would have been difficult to tell if the joint was laced while smoking it.

That decision is currently pending review by the Colorado Supreme Court.

However, the three-judge appellate panel hearing Williams’ case did not believe he was in the same situation as the Mion defendant. First, it appeared Williams was hallucinating before he took the cocaine that was potentially meth. Second, it was unclear whether the alcohol Williams voluntarily drank had caused the hallucinations. Also, unlike in Mion, there was no context given for Williams’ behavior.

“Neither party cites, nor could we find, any testimony discussing the effects of cocaine or meth, how the effects differ, whether Williams had previously used either drug, or whether his behavior was consistent with meth use but not cocaine use,” wrote Judge Terry Fox in the March 13 opinion.

She added that the other components of a typical involuntary intoxication defense did not apply. For that reason, even if Williams unknowingly took meth, there was no evidence the meth caused his criminal conduct.

The case is People v. Williams.

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Michael Karlik

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