Court Opinion

ID: 9711009
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-26 04:22:54.442674+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T18:23:01.601395
License: Public Domain

T. M. Burns, J.
(dissenting). The trial court’s instructions, in pertinent part, were as follows:
"In your deliberations you commence and make a determination whether the first charge has been proven. If that has been proven, you make your determination that the proofs are beyond a reasonable doubt. Then your deliberations cease at that point. You bring in your verdict. If you found that not to exist, or all the elements not to exist, you pass to the next included offense, and to the next, and so forth, until you have deliberated on all the offenses that I charge you on, or determine that the Defendant in fact is not guilty.
* * *
"The number of possible verdicts are as follows: Guilty of Robbery Armed as charged, or guilty of Assault with Intent to Rob Being Armed, or Larceny from the Person, or Assault and Battery, or simple Assault.
"That is the way you will deliberate, commencing at the top working down.
"You have six possible verdicts. You will progress in that fashion. Anytime you make a determination of guilt, then your deliberations cease at that point, and you bring in your verdict; or, if you make a determination of not guilty, you bring that in as the determination of this jury.
"In a criminal case it is necessary that the verdict be unanimous. So that when all the jurors have arrived at a common verdict it will be received as the verdict of this jury.”
Instructions of this nature, which structure the jury’s deliberations and tend to limit the jurors’ consideration of lesser included offenses, are clearly improper and should not be given. People v Hurst, 396 Mich 1, 238 NW2d 6 (1976). The most recent decisions of this. Court, however, hold that such instructions are reversibly erroneous only *258where the jurors are explicitly instructed that they must unanimously find the defendant not guilty of the charged offense before they may deliberate on the lesser included offenses. See People v Erwin, 70 Mich App 60; 245 NW2d 173 (1976), and cases cited therein.
I believe this approach is unworkable. A great number of cases have reached the Court on this issue despite repeated admonitions to avoid instructions which structure the jury’s deliberative process. The trial courts have avoided reversal by toning down the forcefulness of their instructions while still imposing a fixed procedure governing the jury’s deliberations. This Court has aided this process by adopting a sterile "magic language” approach which tends to disregard the effect of improper instructions by simply scanning them for the word "unanimous”. The error is thus augmented. I would hold that instructions which impose a fixed procedure upon the jury’s deliberations whereby the jury is permitted to consider the defendant’s guilt of lesser included offenses only if they first find him not guilty of the charged offense are reversibly erroneous.