Court Opinion

ID: 9625686
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-22 07:47:50.573447+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T18:06:13.405932
License: Public Domain

Justice BUTTERFIELD
concurring.
I join in the majority opinion, but write separately to express my view that while this defendant may not have been prejudiced by the trial court’s failure to give the agreed-upon instruction, the court’s handling of the situation was fundamentally unfair. In my opinion, by forcing defense counsel to retract his earlier statements, the trial court may have cast aspersions on counsel’s competence in the minds of the jurors. The court’s actions not only required defense counsel to “eat his words,” such actions also compelled him to *524change the course of his argument midstream in order to deal with the court’s decision to withdraw second-degree murder as a possible verdict. The obvious purpose of the charge conference is to enable counsel to know what instructions will be given so that counsel will be in a position to argue the facts in light of the law to be charged to the jury. Counsel, therefore, must be able to stand on the decisions reached by the court during the charge conference and to structure closing arguments accordingly.
Defendant’s defense, as manifested in counsel’s argument to the jury, was to admit some degree of culpability less than first-degree murder. At the time of the court’s decision to -withdraw the promised instruction, defense counsel had not specifically asked the jury to convict defendant of second-degree murder. Nonetheless, as the court noted, counsel had firmly “planted” the seed, vehemently arguing that if the jury was to find defendant guilty of anything, it should be second-degree murder, not first-degree murder. Thus, the anticipated instruction was the cornerstone of the case defense counsel constructed in his argument.
Additionally, I believe that the court’s promise to instruct on second-degree murder induced the defense to acknowledge some culpability on the part of defendant. The defense’s reliance on the promised instruction was compounded by the fact that prior to changing its decision, the trial court interrupted defense counsel’s argument to inquire as to whether defendant consented to counsel’s admission that defendant was guilty of second-degree murder, as required under State v. Harbison, 315 N.C. 175, 337 S.E.2d 504 (1985), cert. denied, 476 U.S. 1123, 90 L. Ed. 2d 672 (1986). Therefore, on these facts, the failure of the trial court to give an instruction on second-degree murder after agreeing to do so was fundamentally unfair. However, because the evidence of defendant’s guilt was overwhelming, I am satisfied that the court’s failure to instruct the jury as promised was harmless.