Court Opinion

ID: 9587708
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-21 23:25:28.445574+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T12:47:26.417947
License: Public Domain

CHAPEL, Judge,
specially concurring:
I concur with the Court’s decision in this case to reverse and remand for a new trial. However, I would take this opportunity to abandon the use of the flight instruction in criminal trials in Oklahoma. The Oklahoma Instruction, OUJI-CR 806, cannot be made acceptable by minor changes in wording because there is no valid reason to ever give such an instruction.
First, the instruction “serves no real purpose, as it is a particularization of the general charge on circumstantial evidence, and as the state is free to use circumstantial evidence of flight to argue the defendant’s guilt.” Cameron v. State, 256 Ga. 225, 345 S.E.2d 575, 578 (1986) (Bell, J., Concurring).
More importantly, however, evidence that a person left the scene of an alleged crime proves only that he or she departed. “... [I]t is a matter of common knowledge that men who are entirely innocent do sometimes fly from the scene of a crime through fear of being apprehended as the guilty parties, or from an unwillingness to appear as witnesses.” Alberty v. U.S., 162 U.S. 499, 16 S.Ct. 864, 868, 40 L.Ed. 1051 (1896).1 To infer *688guilt from departure is not a leap I am prepared to sanction.

. The Supreme Court has "consistently doubted the probative value in criminal trials of evidence *688that the accused fled the scene of an actual or supposed crime.” Wong Sun v. U.S., 371 U.S. 471, 483 n. 10, 83 S.Ct. 407, 415 n. 10, 9 L.Ed.2d 441 (1963).