Opinion ID: 2328650
Heading Depth: 1
Heading Rank: 3

Heading: Lord Hale Instruction

Text: Hardin's next contention is that the Superior Court erred, as a matter of law, in not giving the jury what has become known as a Lord Hale instruction as his attorney requested at trial. After the State rested its case, Hardin's defense counsel requested the trial judge to instruct the jury to view with caution the testimony of the complaining witness, Sarah Jackson. The specific instruction that the defense asked to be given to the jury was as follows: You are instructed that the crimes of Unlawful Sexual Contact Second Degree and Rape Fourth Degree are, generally speaking, easily made and hard to contradict or disprove, even if the Defendant is innocent. It is a character of crime that tends to create a prejudice against the person charged. From the nature of a case such as this, the complaining witness is the only witness testifying directly as to the alleged act constituting the crimes. For these reasons, the law requires that you examine the testimony of the prosecuting witness with caution, consider the testimony in light of all of the circumstances shown and then determine the truth with deliberative judgment, uninfluenced by the nature of the charge. The defense based its request on a prior decision by this Court in Wilson v. State . [8] In Wilson, we held that such an instruction was permissible under certain circumstances. [9] The trial judge considered the request by Hardin's attorney, but did not give the jury the cautionary instruction. The caution that rape is an accusation easily made and hard to be proved, and harder to be defended by the party accused, tho never so innocent [10] originated from a passage in the writings of Sir Matthew Hale [11] that were published post-humously in 1736. [12] The caution first arose in reference to a rape charge where the victim was an infant witness and, under the law at that time, incompetent to testify. [13] Hale later expanded his caution to include adult victims as well. [14] When Lord Hale developed his cautionary instruction, rape was a capital offense, i.e., punishable by death. [15] As this Court has noted, Lord Hale's caution arose at a time when due process protections for the accused in a criminal case were relatively undeveloped, quite unlike today's standards and goals for criminal justice. [16] Indeed, [t]he fundamental precepts of due process, that an accused is presumed innocent and is to be acquitted unless proven guilty beyond a reasonable doubt ... were recognized as desiderata in Hale's era but had yet to crystallize into rights.... The rights of an accused to present witnesses in his defense and to compel their attendance, subsequently enshrined in the Sixth Amendment, were barely nascent in the 17th century.... Most importantly of all, in the context of a rape case, one accused of a felony in Hale's day had no right whatsoever to the assistance of counsel.... [17] In Hale's era, therefore, trial on a charge of rape would force an accused, on trial for his life, to stand alone before a jury inflamed by passion and to attempt to answer a carefully contrived story without benefit of counsel, witnesses, or even a presumption of innocence. [18] By the late 1760's Lord Hale's caution had made its way to America by way of Sir William Blackstone's Commentaries on the Laws of England. [19] Blackstone urged jurors to receive Hale's caution and to consider whether the witness was of `good' or `evil fame,' how quickly the crime was reported, and whether the victim cried out. [20] Nevertheless, it appears that Lord Hale's caution did not begin to become adopted by courts in the United States until the mid-nineteenth century. [21] In 1873, Lord Hale's caution was introduced into the Delaware judicial system with an instruction to the jury, in appropriate cases, that it must be satisfied that every essential element in the crime has been proved beyond a reasonable doubt. [22] Over eighty years later, in Wilson v. State , this Court stated: [The caution] embodies a wise precept, and there are many cases in which it is not only appropriate but required. For example, if the woman's testimony is not corroborated and the evidence is conflicting... or if the circumstances suggest doubt of the truth of her story, ... it is held to be reversible error to refuse the charge. [23] In Thompson v. State, [24] this Court again considered the propriety of instructing the jury with Lord Hale's caution. In affirming the trial judge's denial of a defendant's motion for the caution to be given to the jury under the particular circumstances of that case, this Court questioned the continued use of Lord Hale's caution but refused to eliminate the instruction from Delaware's jurisprudence. Instead, this Court held that Lord Hale's caution was not required in every case in which an accused denies his involvement in a rape. [25] Since this Court's concerns were expressed in Thompson, Lord Hale's caution has grown increasingly out of favor in other jurisdictions. [26] The major movement to abandon the caution began in 1975 with California, [27] closely followed by Iowa [28] and Arizona. [29] Several other courts have subsequently held that the instruction is improper. [30] Additionally, in the 1980s, Colorado, [31] Minnesota, [32] Nevada [33] and Pennsylvania [34] all enacted statutes abolishing Lord Hale's caution as an instruction to the jury. In People v. Rincon-Pineda , the California Supreme Court held that the instruction now performs no just function. [35] The court noted that, while perhaps reasonable at the time, many of the justifications for Lord Hale's caution were no longer true today. [36] The due process protections that are extant today and that were not in existence at the time of Lord Hale, suffice of themselves to sap the instruction of contemporary validity. [37] We agree with that reasoning. Accordingly, we join those courts that have concluded that such a cautionary instruction is no longer appropriate. We hold that the trial judge in Hardin's case properly refused to give the Lord Hale cautionary instruction to the jury. We further hold that such an instruction should not be given by Delaware judges in the future under any circumstances. The decisions of this Court to the contrary are overruled.