Opinion ID: 2585503
Heading Depth: 3
Heading Rank: 7

Heading: Failure to Instruct the Jury on Lingering Doubt

Text: Defendant next argues the trial court violated his rights under the Fifth, Sixth, Eighth and Fourteenth Amendments to the United States Constitution, as well as analogous state constitutional guarantees, by refusing two proposed instructions addressing the issue of lingering doubt. The first rejected instruction stated: The adjudication of guilt is not infallible and any lingering doubts you may entertain on the question of guilt may be considered by you in determining the appropriate penalty, including the possibility that at some time in the future, facts may come to light which have not yet been discovered. The second rejected instruction was similar, though shorter: [The jury should consider] whether or not you have lingering or residual doubt as to whether Andrew Brown shot Christina Ramirez. [A]though it is proper for the jury to consider lingering doubt, there is no requirement that the court specifically instruct the jury that it may do so. ( People v. Slaughter (2002) 27 Cal.4th 1187, 1219, 120 Cal.Rptr.2d 477, 47 P.3d 262.) The rule is the same under the state and federal Constitutions. ( Franklin v. Lynaugh (1988) 487 U.S. 164, 173-174, 108 S.Ct. 2320, 101 L.Ed.2d 155; People v. Lawley, supra, 27 Cal.4th at p. 166, 115 Cal.Rptr.2d 614, 38 P.3d 461.) Moreover, although defendant contends the proposed instructions would have merely given the jury the opportunity to consider any lingering doubt they may have had concerning the ... murder, the instructions given already permitted such an opportunity. Thus, the proposed lingering doubt instructions were subsumed by the instruction based on section 190.3, factor (k), which informed the jury to consider and take into account any other circumstance which extenuates the gravity of the crime even though it is not a legal excuse for the crime and any other sympathetic or other aspect of the defendant's character or record. Defendant argues the first proposed lingering doubt instruction was also necessary to permit the jury's proper consideration of penalty phase evidence showing he had committed several unadjudicated criminal acts, allowing it to disregard such evidence if it harbored a lingering doubt as to his guilt of those crimes. We agree with respondent that the instruction was unnecessary because the court instructed the jury not to consider evidence of other criminal acts unless defendant's guilt was proved beyond a reasonable doubt. [21] Defendant also contends a lingering doubt instruction was necessary because two jurors who deliberated at the penalty phase had not been a part of the jury that found defendant guilty in the guilt phase of trial. [22] Thus, he argues: These two former alternate jurors were thus never given the authority to reject imposition of the death penalty on the basis of any evidence relevant to the circumstances of the crime [defendant] had been convicted of in the guilt phase of the trial.... This claim is belied by the section 190.3, factor (k) instruction, which permitted the new jurors, as well as the existing ones, to consider any lingering doubts the jurors might have had and to reject the death penalty in favor of a life sentence. Accordingly, we conclude the trial court did not err in refusing the two proposed lingering doubt instructions.