Opinion ID: 2010891
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 3

Heading: Sufficiency of the Evidence: Count Two (First-Degree Murder While Armed) and Count Three (PFCV)

Text: We need not consider such Wilson-Bey applications further. Given our conclusion that the count one conspiracy conviction embraced the elements of a Pinkerton conspiracy, we must conclude that a unanimous jury properly found Wheeler guilty of murder while armed, as well as PFCV. Based on the evidence presented in Part I and assembled in Part III. A. to demonstrate Wheeler's participation in a conspiracy to murder Taylor, we are satisfied that Taylor's murder by an armed killer, and thus the killer's possession of a firearm during a crime of violence, werelike the murder itselfcrimes readily described as natural or reasonably foreeseeable consequences of that conspiracy. Those overt acts by Wheeler's unknown co-conspirator justified, under Pinkerton, the jury's verdicts convicting Wheeler not only of conspiracy to murder but also of first-degree murder while armed and possession of a firearm during a crime of violence. As we have observed in analyzing the murder in Part III. B. above, the fact that some jurors may have relied on the erroneous aiding-and-abetting instruction, rather than on the Pinkerton theory, to find reasonable foreseeability is irrelevant, and the instructional error harmless, given the legal validity of the result under Pinkerton.