Opinion ID: 487448
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 5

Heading: Significance of the Instructions Committee's Determinations

Text: 40 Our reading of Kirby finds support in the Wisconsin Criminal Jury Instructions Committee's 1982 decision to include great bodily harm as an element of mayhem. See supra n. 1 and accompanying text. In a footnote to the revised No. 1230, the Committee made clear that the change was necessitated by Kirby. Id. Why it took the Instructions Committee four years to catch up with Kirby is not evident; perhaps the sparsity of mayhem cases was a contributing factor. In any event, the date of the revision is not important. What counts is that the legal development that spurred the revision took place more than two years prior to Cole's offense, in October 1978 when Kirby was decided. 41 Though the Committee's determinations do not carry independent force of law, the Wisconsin courts have often found them to be persuasive evidence of what the law is. See, e.g., State v. Saternus, 127 Wis.2d 460, 381 N.W.2d 290 (1986). As the Wisconsin Supreme Court has stated, the pattern instructions are the product of painstaking effort of an eminently qualified committee of trial judges, lawyers, and legal scholars, designed to accurately state the law and afford a means of uniformity of instructions throughout the state. State v. Kanzelberger, 28 Wis.2d 652, 137 N.W.2d 419, 422-23 (1965). Indeed, in this very case, the Wisconsin Court of Appeals appeared to rely on the giving of the then-current pattern instruction as a ground for affirming Cole's conviction. See State v. Cole, slip op. at 3-4. We conclude that a Wisconsin court would give weight to the Committee's determinations, and therefore so do we.