Court Opinion

ID: 9791276
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-31 02:08:23.826149+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T07:37:35.186866
License: Public Domain

FIDEL, Judge,
dissenting:
The trial court erroneously instructed the jury, “If you decide that the defendant’s conduct was justified, you must find the defendant not guilty.”
Though this language comes from a once recommended Arizona jury instruction, it was unequivocally repudiated five years ago in State v. Hunter, 142 Ariz. 88, 688 P.2d 980 (1984), and it is unacceptable to find it still in use today. As our supreme court made clear in Hunter, the jury need not “decide [that] the defendant’s conduct was justified” — it need only find reasonable doubt whether the conduct was justified — in order to find the defendant not guilty. Id. at 89, 688 P.2d at 981. The instruction misstates the burden to the state’s advantage and the defendant’s harm.
My colleagues acknowledge Hunter, but evade it. The fault there, they suggest, lay in the instructions as a whole and not in the precise statement, “If you decide the defendant’s conduct was justified, you must find the defendant not guilty.” The supreme court, however, has said otherwise. In State v. Cannon, 157 Ariz. 107, 755 P.2d 412 (1988), it described this very statement as “[t]he language ... that Hunter found objectionable____” Id. at 107, 755 P.2d at 412. Its fault, Cannon added, was to create “the risk that the jury would believe that the accused had the burden to prove justification.” Id.
The majority finds this risk acceptably diminished in this case by the juxtaposition of the statement, “[t]he defendant does not have the burden to prove that he acted in self-defense.” I disagree. While this latter statement is certainly correct, its juxtaposition with a contrary proposition fails to cure the harm. At best, it creates confusion. Though the court tells the jury in one breath that the defendant has no burden to prove justification, it suggests in the next that the jury must find justification in order to acquit. This is not an area where a half-right instruction will do.
The supreme court said in Hunter: “It is vital that the jury not misunderstand the concept of the defendant’s burden of proof on self-defense; the jury must be instructed with great care to prevent the misunderstanding of this concept.” 142 Ariz. at 90, 688 P.2d at 982, quoting State v. Denny, 119 Ariz. 131, 134, 579 P.2d 1101, 1104 (1978). A jury is not “instructed with great care to prevent ... misunderstanding” when it is instructed in internally contradictory terms:
It is the duty of the court to give the jury the rules of law to guide their deliberations and determinations, and these rules must not be at such cross purposes as to confuse and mislead the jury. If the instructions are contradictory upon the main point in question, how is the *359jury to know which to follow, or which is a correct statement of the law?
State v. King, 158 Ariz. 419, 425-26, 763 P.2d 239, 245-46 (1988), quoting Hurley v. State, 22 Ariz. 211, 222, 196 P. 159, 163 (1921).
One cannot know what portion of a set of instructions might be seized on in the jury room to resolve a point of contention among the jurors. For this reason among others, “Ordinarily, errors in jury instructions defining a party’s burden of proof are considered fundamental.” King, 158 Ariz. at 424, 763 P.2d at 244. In my opinion, fundamental error was committed in this case, confusing the burden of proof on the critical issue of self-defense. I would reverse.