Melancon v. State

Summary

The court vacated the Court of Appeals’ judgment because the evidence did not establish that Melancon’s instruction to stop cooperating with DFCS was either a cause in fact or a legal cause of his daughter’s death. It clarified that murder causation requires both an actual causal relationship and a death that was a reasonably foreseeable, probable, or natural consequence of the defendant’s conduct. The case was remanded for the Court of Appeals to evaluate the State’s other causation theories in the first instance.