Court Opinion

ID: 9661179
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-23 22:31:36.287607+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T18:14:26.115247
License: Public Domain

PALMORE, Chief Justice,
concurring.
Since Gatliff v. Commonwealth, 32 K.L.R. 1063, 107 S.W. 739 (1908), was decided there have been a number of opinions expressing as a general principle that when the defendant in a homicide prosecution admits the killing but claims it was an accident he is not entitled to a self-defense instruction. In those that I have read, however, the evidence would not have justified such an instruction anyway. None of them overrules Gatliff. And all of them were decided when the defendant had the burden of proof on the issue of self-defense, whereas under the recently-enacted Penal Code the Commonwealth has it. KRS 500.070(1), 503.050. Under the law that now applies the issue is raised, and an instruction is *669required, when there is evidence sufficient to create a reasonable doubt on the part of the jury. Jewell v. Commonwealth, Ky., 549 S.W.2d 807, 812 (1977). But aside from this technical shift in procedural balance, Gatliff simply makes good sense and therefore is good law today as it was in 1908. It seems to me that it would not be unreasonable for a jury to discount Mrs. Pace’s testimony that the shooting was unintentional and at the same time deduce that she may very well have shot her husband out of fear.
I think that the necessity for an instruction on self-protection in this kind of case depends on what the evidence would require in the absence of the defendant’s own testimony with reference to his state of mind at the time of the killing, the same as if some other witness had described the incident and the defendant had not testified at all. Under that approach, the subjective testimony of the defendant need not be given the arbitrary effect of cancelling the jury’s freedom to draw its inferences from the objective evidence alone.
LUKOWSKY, J., joins in this concurring opinion.