Court Opinion

ID: 9726373
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-26 12:46:38.512242+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T18:25:26.587587
License: Public Domain

GRODIN, J., Concurring.
Making standard homicide instructions more intelligible to the jury is a worthy goal, and one I share with our dissenting colleague. To pursue that goal through extemporaneous remarks to the jury, however, is a risky venture even, as this case demonstrates, for an exceptionally able and experienced jurist.
*1016In concluding that the error was harmless our dissenting colleague focuses entirely upon the prosecution’s evidence, and ignores the defendant’s evidence which, of course, the jury may have believed.
According to defense witnesses, the defendant was being assaulted by a man with a knife who called him a “nigger” and threatened to kill him. To say that these circumstances could provide no “rational basis” for a finding that the defendant shot Agnew in a heat of passion (cf. People v. Valentine (1946) 28 Cal.2d 121 [169 P.2d 1]) or on the basis of an unreasonable belief in the necessity of self-defense, and thus without the “malice” requisite to the crime of murder (cf. People v. Flannel (1979) 25 Cal.3d 668 [160 Cal.Rptr. 84, 603 P.2d 1]), imports a standard of “rationality” which injects the court far more deeply into the thought processes of the jury than in my view is warranted under existing authority.
“A trial court should not ... measure the substantiality of the evidence by undertaking to weigh the credibility of the witnesses, a task exclusively relegated to the jury.” (People v. Flannel, supra, 25 Cal.3d at p. 684.) “Doubts as to the sufficiency of the evidence to warrant instructions should be resolved in favor of the accused.” (People v. Wilson (1967) 66 Cal.2d 749, 763 [59 Cal.Rptr. 156, 427 P.2d 820]; People v. Flannel, supra, at p. 685.) To suggest that there was no “rational basis” for a finding of voluntary manslaughter -in this case is equivalent to suggesting that a failure to give an instruction on voluntary manslaughter would not have been reversible error; but, as the foregoing authorities demonstrate, that is clearly not the law.
I note that the defendant asserts a number of additional grounds for reversal which have arguable merit but which, due to my concurrence in the principal opinion, I find it unnecessary to reach.