Opinion ID: 2576429
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 2

Heading: jury reinstruction

Text: ¶9 Weaver next contends that the trial court plainly erred by failing to reinstruct the jury on the presumption of innocence at the close of the evidence and the State's burden of proving guilt beyond a reasonable doubt, arguing that rule 17(g)(6) of the Utah Rules of Criminal Procedure requires such recitation. [1] Again, our opinion in Reyes is determinative in resolving this issue. ¶10 The defendant in Reyes hewed to the same hidebound interpretation of rule 17(g)(6) that Weaver urges us to adopt herenamely, that the rule requires a trial judge to read all instructions to the jury at the close of evidence, including those instructions that the judge may have already read to the jury earlier. 2005 UT 33 at ¶ 40. While we acknowledged in Reyes that such an interpretation was plausible, we asserted that it was by no means the only reasonable interpretation of rule 17(g)(6). Id. at ¶ 43. Instead, we construed the rule to require trial judges to provide some instruction when the evidence is concluded, but we declined to offer guidance on the nature and extent of the instructions to be given at that stage of the trial, thereby ceding to trial judges the discretion to determine the appropriate instructions to deliver to the jury at the close of evidence. Id. at ¶ 45. Applying this interpretation to a later case, State v. Cruz, we concluded that [a] trial court's decision not to reread its preliminary instructions at the close of evidence is erroneous only if it reflects an abuse of discretion. 2005 UT 45, ¶ 27, ___ P.3d ___. ¶11 In both Reyes and Cruz, we determined that two factors established that the trial court had not abused its discretion in declining to reread previously issued jury instructions at the close of evidence: (1) the relatively short lapse of time between `the trial court's reading of the preliminary instructions [and] the conclusion of the evidence,' and (2) the fact that `the jury was provided with a written copy of every instruction.' Id. at ¶ 28 (quoting Reyes, 2005 UT 33 at ¶ 49). ¶12 The facts in this case are even more compelling than those in Reyes or Cruz. In Reyes, the lapse in time between the trial court's reading of preliminary instructions and the close of evidence was less than twenty-four hours. 2005 UT 33 at ¶ 49. In Cruz, it was just over forty-eight hours. 2005 UT 45 at ¶ 29. Here, the time lapse was a mere five or six hours. Moreover, the jury in this case was provided with a written copy of every instruction. We cannot say that the court's failure to reread instructions to the jury that it had already read to them only a few hours earlier, and of which all members of the jury had a written copy, constituted any error, let alone plain error. Thus, Weaver's second argument also fails.