Opinion ID: 2551366
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 3

Heading: The Government's Responses

Text: As to appellant's last point, the trial judge's intention, the government responds that the judge did not design the supplemental instruction to lower the government's burden of proof. When the judge characterized the en banc instruction as heavily weighted toward the defense, he was merely looking toward a more balanced way of describing reasonable doubt accurately to the jury. Addressing the language of reinstruction, the government replies that appellant has failed to demonstrate that the supplemental instruction was an incorrect statement of the law; the trial court did not deviate from Smith in any substantial way. Appellant, as we have noted, concedes the point. The government, however, reinforces its response by stressing that legal correctness is all that is required for reinstruction, and that this court  as the trial court recognized  had approved in Payne the very embellishments of Smith at issue here. More specifically, says the government, the first and third changes appellant cites (the use of never and the lengthier references to mathematical and scientific certainty) were taken directly from Payne and are merely stylistic. The middle addition to the reinstruction (beyond a shadow of a doubt) was, as this court said in Payne, linguistically equivalent to the formulation immediately preceding it (beyond all doubt). Both, we said, mean need not prove to a certainty. [24] Next, the government rejects as considerably exaggerate[d] appellant's contextual argument that adds legal significance to the new, shadow language and words of emphasis and repetition. The government minimizes that argument because the reinstruction included nonsubstantive changes in what remained a single sentence.  (Emphasis in government's brief.) Furthermore, the government reminds us, the trial court removed the most argumentative phrases in the Payne instruction: `that's impossible,' and `there's no such thing.' [25] Finally, agreeing with appellant that any reinstruction must be fairly balanced, [26] the government finds no disqualifying imbalance[] in the reinstruction. It contends that this court's concern about lack of balance typically refers to a trial court's emphasis in reinstruction on one aspect of the case, such as the elements of voluntary manslaughter, to the exclusion of another key aspect, such as the criteria for self-defense. [27] The government appears to acknowledge, nonetheless, that the court's reinstruction on reasonable doubt could be unbalanced if it had included only the sentence appellant complains of. But, says the government, the court repeated the entire reasonable doubt instruction, with six sentences describing what reasonable doubt is and only two sentences spelling out what it is not. Accordingly, whatever added language there may have been for appellant to complain about in the reinstruction, it was more than offset by language from the original instruction, reread to the jurors, that reinforced the language favorable to the defense.