Court Opinion

ID: 9651642
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-23 16:29:54.645772+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T18:12:37.069573
License: Public Domain

REILLY, Senior Judge,
dissenting:
In my view, the instructions given by the trial judge adequately put the jurors on notice that they were required to determine whether or not the appellant had reasonable grounds for believing that he was witnessing an assault by robbers rather than a forcible arrest by police officers, and therefore justified in coming to the aid of the victim. The judge’s description of the defense theory was plainly a fair one. His later admonition to the jury that it should not convict unless the government proved that the accused acted “without justifiable and excusable cause” was obviously a reminder of his previous reference to the defense theory.
In this context any further elaboration of what constituted reasonable conduct under the circumstances would have been superfluous. The court had already pointed out that to determine guilt, the jurors would have to find “that the actions defendant took were deliberate and intentional and not by accident or by mistake.”
While the standard instructions are useful reference tools when a trial court is consulting with lawyers for the parties pri- or to giving his charge, their existence does not prevent a court from modifying or paraphrasing the standard wording for the clarification of a jury. I think the majority opinion attaches undue weight to the trial *1029judge’s questionable reason for not giving the requested instruction. Certainly the jury was unaware of this comment during its deliberations. In short, I feel the record calls for affirmance.