Opinion ID: 888658
Heading Depth: 1
Heading Rank: 11

Heading: Did the District Court properly instruct the jury on weapons enhancement?

Text: ¶ 69 A court may impose a penalty enhancement once a jury makes a unanimous finding of guilt as to the underlying crime. The jury then must make a separate, unanimous finding, that the defendant committed the act that supports the enhancement. Section 46-1-401, MCA. The District Court instructed the jury on weapons enhancement in the context of deliberate homicide. The court did not instruct the jury separately on weapons enhancement with regard to mitigated deliberate homicide. Schmidt claims that the jury instruction became the law of the case under State v. Crawford, 2002 MT 117, 310 Mont. 18, 48 P.3d 706. ¶ 70 Crawford turned on a jury instruction that contained an extraneous element. The State's failure to object to the proposed jury instruction rendered the instruction the law of the case. Crawford, ¶ 27, 48 P.3d 706. The jury became bound by the instruction. The court's inclusion of this extraneous element in the jury instruction required the jury to find the extraneous element, in addition to finding all of the statutorily required elements. Crawford, ¶ 27, 48 P.3d 706. ¶ 71 The jury instruction that Schmidt challenges did not add or delete any elements of the underlying offense. The District Court considered this instruction in the context of all thirty-three jury instructions taken as a whole. State v. Dasen, 2007 MT 87, ¶ 34, 337 Mont. 74, 155 P.3d 1282. The jury instructions clearly stated that the charge of mitigated deliberate homicide required proof of all the same elements as deliberate homicide. The instructions also directed the jury to consider all of the instructions as a whole, and ... to regard each in light of all the others. The verdict form expressly directed the jury to answer the weapons enhancement inquiry if it found Schmidt guilty of mitigated deliberate homicide. The rule announced in Crawford has no application to these facts. The jury instructions, considered as a whole, fully and fairly instructed the jury on the applicable law. Dasen, ¶ 34.