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Crawford v. State10/20/2005
t Crawford committed first-degree murder, it could find him guilty of any lesser included offense, including voluntary manslaughter if the evidence was "sufficient to establish his guilt of such lesser offense beyond a reasonable doubt." Additionally, as the State emphasizes, the jury was instructed: "If you are convinced beyond a reasonable doubt that an unlawful killing has been committed by the defendant, but you have a reasonable doubt whether such killing was murder or manslaughter, you must give the defendant the benefit of that doubt and return a verdict of Voluntary Manslaughter." Citing to Stroup v. State, the State argues that no additional instructions were required.
The language in the proposed instruction defining the State's burden is a correct, albeit in our view incomplete, statement of the law. The United States Supreme Court held in Mullaney v. Wilbur that "the Due Process Clause requires the prosecution to prove beyond a reasonable doubt the absence of the heat of passion on sudden provocation when the issue is properly presented in a homicide case." This court has followed the Mullaney doctrine and has held, with respect to a theory of self- defense, that instructions imposing a burden of proof upon a defendant to negate an element of a charged offense are improper.
We conclude as a threshold matter that no such burden was imposed in this case, and Crawford's proposed instruction was not specifically required by Mullaney. In this, we note that the district court correctly instructed the jury that: (1) murder is "the unlawful killing of a human being with malice aforethought, whether express or implied"; (2) "malice aforethought" is "the intentional doing of a wrongful act without legal cause or excuse or what the law considers adequate provocation" (emphasis added); (3) the provocation necessary for voluntary manslaughter consists of either "a serious and highly provoking injury inflicted upon the person killing, sufficient to excite an irresistible passion in a reasonable person, or an attempt by the person killed to commit a serious personal injury on the person killing"; (4) the defendant is "presumed innocent until the contrary is proved"; and (5) the State has "the burden of proving beyond a reasonable doubt every material element of the crime charged and that the Defendant is the person who committed the offense."
Under these instructions, in order to find Crawford guilty of first-degree willful, deliberate, and premeditated murder, the jury necessarily had to find that the State proved beyond a reasonable doubt that Crawford killed Dugan with malice aforethought, that is, without "what the law considers adequate provocation." As the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals concluded in Dunckhurst v. Deeds under strikingly similar circumstances, "Mullaney's admonition that the State bears the burden of proving the absence of provocation, where lack of adequate provocation is an element of the crime charged, was satisfied."
As the discussion above illustrates, the instructions actually provided to the jury in this case did generally and technically encompass Crawford's proposed instruction. Therefore, the State quite legitimately argues that under this court's holding in Stroup, the district court did not err in rejecting Crawford's requested instruction on the ground that it was covered by the other instructions provided. We are of the view, however, that the majority holding in Stroup places undue limitations on a criminal defendant's ability to have the jury specifically instructed on the significance of the defendant's theory of the defense. Therefore, we have reconsidered our holding in Stroup and now expressly overrule it.
In Stroup, a
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