What is the test for determining whether a medical decision to withhold antibiotics was an independent factor in the prosecution of a physician for murder?

Even if a victim's death occurs in an unanticipated manner, the defendant is liable for homicide unless a superseding intervening act has broken the chain of causation. The intervening cause must be unforeseeable and extraordinary, and a defendant remains criminally liable if he might reasonably have contemplated the possible consequence or should have foreseen the possibility of harm of the kind that could result from his act. (People v. Fiu (2008) 165 Cal.App.4th 360, 371.) In People v. Funes (1994) 23 Cal.App.4th 1506, for example, the court held that the trial court had properly rejected an instruction on intervening causes in a prosecution for murder when the victim died 46 days after his beating, following a medical decision to withhold antibiotics. The court held that the decision to withhold antibiotics, as a matter of law, was not an independent

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