Court Opinion

ID: 9427624
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-02 23:21:25.131388+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:23:08.533823
License: Public Domain

Me. Justice Rehnquist,
with whom The Chief Justice joins,
concurring.
The Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution prohibits any State from depriving a person of liberty without due process of law, and in Mullaney v. Wilbur, 421 U. S. 684 (1975), this Court held that the Fourteenth Amendment’s guarantees prohibit a State from shifting to the defendant the burden of disproving an element of the crime charged. I am loath to see this Court go into the business of parsing jury instructions given by state trial courts, for as we have consistently recognized, “a single instruction to a jury may not be judged in artificial isolation, but must be viewed in the context of the overall charge.” Cupp v. Naughten, 414 U. S. 141, 146-147 (1973). And surely if this charge had, in the words of the Court, “merely described a permissive inference,” ante, at 514, it could not conceivably have run afoul of the constitutional decisions cited by the Court in its opinion. But a majority of my Brethren conclude that “it is clear that a reasonable juror could easily have viewed such an instruction as mandatory,” ante, at 515, and counsel for the State admitted in oral argument “that 'it’s possible’ that the jury believed they were required to apply the presumption.” Ante, at 514-515.
*528While I continue to have doubts as to whether this particular jury was so attentively attuned to the instructions of the trial court that it divined the difference recognized by lawyers between “infer” and “presume,” I defer to the judgment of the majority of the Court that this difference in meaning may have been critical in its effect on the jury. I therefore concur in the Court’s opinion and judgment.