Opinion ID: 1179776
Heading Depth: 5
Heading Rank: 4

Heading: Failure to Give Accomplice Instructions.

Text: (9a) Defendant contends that prosecution witness James Valdez was, or at least may have been, an accomplice in the Beacon robbery. Hence, defendant urges, the trial court erred by failing, sua sponte, to instruct the jury on the law of accomplices, including the requirements that an accomplice's testimony must be corroborated and should be viewed with distrust. (ง 1111; CALJIC Nos. 3.11, 3.18.) (10) For instructional purposes, an accomplice is a person who is liable to prosecution for the identical offense charged against the defendant on trial in the cause in which the testimony of the accomplice is given. (ง 1111; People v. Sully, supra, 53 Cal.3d 1195, 1227; People v. Miranda (1987) 44 Cal.3d 57, 99 [241 Cal. Rptr. 594, 744 P.2d 1127].) (9b) Defendant suggests that Valdez was implicated in the robbery murder insofar as he created a diversion by stealing beer, then drove the getaway car. The evidence indicates that Valdez had no advance knowledge of the robbery, did not intend his beer stealing as a robbery diversion, and had left the store, still ignorant of defendant's intentions, before the robbery began. On the other hand, the robbery may have been a reasonably foreseeable consequence of the agreed plan to steal merchandise from the store, and Valdez did help defendant transport robbery proceeds away from the scene. These are arguable grounds for charging Valdez, as an aider and abettor, with both the robbery and the attendant felony murder of Waltrip. (See, e.g., People v. Montoya (1991) 7 Cal.4th 1027, 1040-1041, 1044 [31 Cal. Rptr.2d 128, 874 P.2d 903].) However, we need not resolve whether the failure to give accomplice instructions under these circumstances was error. The omission of such instructions, even if erroneous, is deemed harmless where there was ample evidence corroborating the witness's testimony. ( People v. Sully, supra, 53 Cal.3d 1195, 1228; People v. Miranda, supra, 44 Cal.3d 57, 100.) Valdez's testimony about defendant's perpetration of the Beacon robbery murder was amply corroborated by the eyewitness identifications of Lawrence Galvin and Edgar Calderon, by Sonya White's testimony that defendant admitted the robbery, and by defendant's threat to Victor Trejo that he had already made a movita on someone else that night. Defendant thus suffered no prejudice. For similar reasons, there is no merit to defendant's claim that the failure to give accomplice instructions violated his right to due process under the Fourteenth Amendment of the United States Constitution. No basis for reversal appears.