Opinion ID: 2972705
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 2

Heading: Malice Instruction

Text: The due process provisions of the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution forbid any state from shifting to a criminal defendant the burden of disproving an element of the crime with which the individual is charged. See Mullaney v. Wilbur, 421 U.S. 684 (1975); In re Winship, 397 U.S. 358 (1970). In his first issue on appeal, Lane contends that the instruction given by the trial judge allowing the jury to infer malice “[i]f a deadly weapon is handled in a manner so as to make the killing a natural or probable result of such conduct” unconstitutionally removed from the prosecution the necessity of establishing an element of the offense beyond a reasonable doubt.1 In Sandstrom v. Montana, 442 U.S. 510, 523-24 (1979), the United States Supreme Court confirmed that presumptions, whether conclusive or merely burden-shifting, deprive a defendant of 1 The warden asserts that this challenge has been procedurally defaulted by the petitioner’s failure to raise the issue of improper jury instructions in the Tennessee appellate courts. The warden himself, however, failed to advance his procedural default argument in the district court. In any event, Lane did in fact submit his jury instruction claims to the state appellate courts at every opportunity after obtaining new counsel who challenged the effectiveness of his trial counsel. -5- 04-5469 Lane v. Carlton due process by casting upon him the responsibility of disproving an element of a charged offense. In Francis v. Franklin, 471 U.S. 307, 314 (1985), however, the Court recognized that permissive inferences generally do not suffer from the same constitutional infirmity. “A permissive inference does not relieve the State of its burden of persuasion because it still requires the State to convince the jury that the suggested conclusion should be inferred based on the predicate facts proved.” Id. Nevertheless, a permissive inference will be found to violate due process principles “if the suggested conclusion is not one that reason and common sense justify in light of the proven facts before the jury.” Id. at 314-15 (citing Ulster County Court v. Allen, 442 U.S. 140, 157-63 (1979)). Thus: Analysis must focus initially on the specific language challenged, but the inquiry does not end there. If a specific portion of the jury charge, considered in isolation, could reasonably have been understood as creating a presumption that relieves the State of its burden of persuasion on an element of an offense, the potentially offending words must be considered in the context of the charge as a whole. Other instructions might explain the particular infirm language to the extent that a reasonable juror could not have considered the charge to have created an unconstitutional presumption. Id. at 315. In this case, the challenged language itself is cast in a decidedly non-mandatory vein. Not only did the jury instruction use the words “may” and “infer,” but the trial court continued by informing the finders-of-fact that the inference “may be rebutted by either direct or circumstantial evidence,” whether offered by the State or by the defendant. The charge also reminded the jurors that the state “always has the burden of proving every element of the crime charged beyond a reasonable doubt,” that an inference never places a burden of proof upon the defendant, and that the jurors are not even required to draw the inference at issue. In short, in conjunction with more -6- 04-5469 Lane v. Carlton general jury instructions concerning the presumed innocence of the defendant, the precautions taken by the state trial judge to allocate properly the burden of proof in this prosecution ensured that Lane’s due process rights were not abrogated by the malice instruction included in the jury charge. The district court thus properly denied the petitioner relief on this ground.