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524US1

Unit: $U76

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96

HOPKINS v. REEVES

Opinion of the Court

106 Neb. 395, 184 N. W. 68 (1921); Morgan v. State, 51 Neb.
If a Nebraska trial
672, 695, 71 N. W. 788, 794–795 (1897).
court gives instructions on those offenses, and the defendant
is convicted only of second-degree murder or manslaughter,
that conviction must be reversed on appeal. See Thompson
v. State, supra, at 396, 184 N. W., at 68. Thus, as a matter
of law, Nebraska prosecutors cannot obtain convictions for
second-degree murder or manslaughter in a felony-murder
trial.

Beck is therefore distinguishable from this case in two crit-
ical respects. The Alabama statute prohibited instructions
on offenses that state law clearly recognized as lesser in-
cluded offenses of the charged crime, and it did so only in
capital cases. Alabama thus erected an “artiﬁcial barrier”
that restricted its juries to a choice between conviction for
a capital offense and acquittal. Brief for United States as
Amicus Curiae 20 (citing California v. Ramos, 463 U. S. 992,
1007 (1983)). Here, by contrast, the Nebraska trial court
did not deny respondent instructions on any existing lesser
included offense of felony murder; it merely declined to give
instructions on crimes that are not lesser included offenses.
In so doing, the trial court did not create an “artiﬁcial bar-
rier” for the jury; nor did it treat capital cases differently
from noncapital cases.
it simply followed the
Instead,
Nebraska Supreme Court’s interpretation of the relevant
offenses under state law.

By ignoring these distinctions, the Court of Appeals lim-
ited state sovereignty in a manner more severe than the rule
in Beck. Almost all States, including Nebraska, provide in-
structions only on those offenses that have been deemed to
constitute lesser included offenses of the charged crime.
See n. 5, supra.6 We have never suggested that the Consti-

6 In determining whether an offense is a lesser included offense of a
particular crime, the States have adopted a variety of approaches. See,
e. g., State v. Berlin, 133 Wash. 2d 541, 550–551, 947 P. 2d 700, 704–705