Opinion ID: 280033
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 2

Heading: The Accomplice Instruction

Text: 125 The accomplice instruction was improper because the district judge, in his definition of an accomplice, for all practical purposes told the jury that the crime charged had in fact been committed. In so doing, he invaded the province of the jury. This kind of an instruction would be proper in a prosecution where the alleged accomplice admitted his participation in a conceded criminal offense. In that situation, an instruction like the one given here correctly delineates the weight to be accorded the testimony of the accomplice as that testimony tends to implicate others in the crime that has been committed. In the instant case, however, the crucial question was not who the participants of a conceded crime were, but whether a conspiracy to violate the Hobbs Act, the crime charged, had been formed by the alleged conspirators. 126 Because the instruction did not explicitly leave upon the question whether any of the witnesses were accomplices, the jury may reasonably have interpreted the instruction as a direction from the judge that the crime charged had been proved. To avoid this substantial risk of prejudice, the instruction should have been framed so that the jurors were unequivocally informed that they were the sole judges of whether any witness was in fact an accomplice. Such modification would have cured the instruction's vice-- the implied assumption that the alleged conspiracy was a proven fact. See Gordon v. United States, 353 F.2d 9 (5th Cir. 1965).