Opinion ID: 2234065
Heading Depth: 1
Heading Rank: 12

Heading: Jury Instruction: Malice

Text: At the close of the evidentiary phase of the aggravation hearing, the district court instructed the jury that in order to find the substantial prior history of serious assault or terrorizing criminal activity aggravating circumstance, it must find beyond a reasonable doubt that Vela did in fact commit the offense of Murder in the First Degree of ... Lundel[l]. The court instructed the jury that the elements of this offense were that Vela killed Lundell, that he did so purposely and with deliberate and premeditated malice, and that he did so on or after August 15, 2002, in Madison County, Nebraska. In a separate instruction entitled Definitions Applicable to First Degree Murder, the court defined the terms Deliberate, Premeditation, and Intent, but did not define malice. Although Vela submitted written objections to the jury instructions, he did not object on the ground that they did not include a definition of malice, and he did not request an instruction including this definition. Vela contends on appeal that the failure of the district court to instruct the jury on the definition of malice constitutes plain error. Plain error will be noted only where an error is evident from the record, prejudicially affects a substantial right of a litigant, and is of such a nature that to leave it uncorrected would cause a miscarriage of justice or result in damage to the integrity, reputation, and fairness of the judicial process. [54] In the absence of plain error, when an issue is raised for the first time in an appellate court, the issue will be disregarded inasmuch as the trial court cannot commit error regarding an issue never presented and submitted for disposition in the trial court. [55] Absent plain error indicative of a probable miscarriage of justice, the failure to object to a jury instruction after it has been submitted for review precludes raising an objection on appeal. [56] Consideration of plain error occurs at the discretion of an appellate court. [57] Vela relies on State v. Myers [58] in support of his contention that the failure to define malice in the jury instructions constituted plain error. In that case, this court held that failure to define a legal term of art used in a jury instruction can constitute plain error. Vela argues that malice is a legal term of art meaning `that condition of the mind which is manifested by the intentional doing of a wrongful act without just cause or excuse.' [59] In the years since Myers was decided, the U.S. Supreme Court has held that even a failure to submit an entire element of a criminal offense or a sentencing factor to a jury is not structural error automatically requiring reversal, but can be subject to a harmless error analysis. In Neder v. United States, [60] the Court held that an instruction that omits an element of the offense does not necessarily render a criminal trial fundamentally unfair or an unreliable vehicle for determining guilt or innocence. Then, in Washington v. Recuenco, [61] the Court held that [fjailure to submit a sentencing factor to the jury, like failure to submit an element to the jury, is not structural error. Based upon Recuenco, we recently held that the standard for determining whether failure to submit a sentencing factor to a jury constitutes harmless error is whether the record demonstrates beyond a reasonable doubt that a rational jury would have found the existence of a sentencing factor. [62] Unlike Myers, in this case, the jury instructions alleged to constitute plain error were not given in the guilt phase of a murder trial, but, rather, were given after a hearing to determine the existence of aggravating circumstances which would permit the imposition of the death penalty for the five murders for which Vela had already been convicted. Thus, the issue was not whether Vela should be convicted and punished for the murder of Lundell, but, rather, whether his involvement in the Lundell murder established a substantial prior history of serious assaultive or terrorizing criminal activity. [63] And the alleged deficiency in the jury instruction did not involve the failure to submit an entire element of the uncharged Lundell murder by which the State sought to prove the aggravating circumstance described in ง 29-2523(1)(a), but, rather, the deficiency was a failure to define a single word used in one of the elements. And, contrary to Vela's argument, we find no evidence in the record suggesting the absence of malice in the form of legal justification or excuse for the Lundell killing. We conclude that any error in not defining the term malice in the jury instructions would not be of a nature that to leave it uncorrected would cause a miscarriage of justice or result in damage to the integrity, reputation, and fairness of the judicial process so as to constitute plain error. [64] Accordingly, we do not reach the merits of the claimed deficiency in the jury instruction to which no exception was taken in the district court.