Opinion ID: 787515
Heading Depth: 3
Heading Rank: 3

Heading: Boyde

Text: 30 The same day it issued McKoy, the Supreme Court decided Boyde v. California, 494 U.S. 370, 110 S.Ct. 1190, 108 L.Ed.2d 316 (1990). Boyde clarified the legal standard for jury instructions in death penalty cases asserted to be ambiguous and therefore subject to an erroneous interpretation. Id. at 380, 110 S.Ct. 1190. The Court first noted that [i]n assessing the effect of a challenged jury instruction, we follow the familiar rule ... `that a single instruction to a jury may not be judged in artificial isolation, but must be viewed in the context of the overall charge.' Id. at 378, 110 S.Ct. 1190 (quoting Cupp v. Naughten, 414 U.S. 141, 146-47, 94 S.Ct. 396, 38 L.Ed.2d 368 (1973)). The Court next recognized that [t]he legal standard for reviewing jury instructions claimed to restrict impermissibly a jury's consideration of relevant evidence is less than clear from our cases. Id. For example, in Mills alone 31 we alluded to at least three different inquiries for evaluating such a challenge: whether reasonable jurors could have drawn an impermissible interpretation from the trial court's instructions; whether there is a substantial possibility that the jury may have rested its verdict on the `improper' ground; and how reasonable jurors would have applied and understood the instructions. 32 Id. at 379, 108 S.Ct. 1860 (internal citations omitted) (emphasis in text). The Court stated that [a]lthough there may not be great differences among these various phrasings, it is important to settle upon a single formulation for this Court and other courts to employ in deciding this kind of federal question. 4 33 Boyde thus held that the proper inquiry for reviewing a jury instruction that is ambiguous and therefore subject to erroneous interpretation is whether there is a reasonable likelihood that the jury has applied the challenged instruction in a way that prevents the consideration of constitutionally relevant evidence. Id. at 380, 110 S.Ct. 1190. However, a defendant need not establish that the jury was more likely than not 5 to have been impermissibly inhibited by the instruction, though a capital sentencing proceeding is not inconsistent with the Eighth Amendment if there is only a possibility of such an inhibition. Id. (emphasis added). The Court further explained its reasons for requiring a reasonable likelihood of jury confusion, rather than the various formulations in Mills: 34 This reasonable likelihood standard, we think, better accommodates the concerns of finality and accuracy than does a standard which makes the inquiry dependent on how a single hypothetical reasonable juror could or might have interpreted the instruction. There is, of course, a strong policy in favor of accurate determination of the appropriate sentence in a capital case, but there is an equally strong policy against retrials years after the first trial where the claimed error amounts to no more than speculation. Jurors do not sit in solitary isolation booths parsing instructions for subtle shades of meaning in the same way that lawyers might. Differences among them in interpretation of instructions may be thrashed out in the deliberative process, with commonsense understanding of the instructions in the light of all that has taken place at the trial likely to prevail over technical hairsplitting. Id. at 380-81, 110 S.Ct. 1190. 6 35