Fifth Amendment - upholding the constitutional merit of misleading reasonable doubt jury instructions.

AuthorKenney, Shelagh
PositionSupreme Court Review - Case Note
  1. INTRODUCTION

    The United States Supreme Court denied the defendants' appeals in the consolidated cases of Victor v. Nebraska and Sandoval v. California.(1) In each case, the petitioner argued that the state trial court's reasonable doubt jury instruction suggested that a lower standard of proof was necessary for conviction than the standard required by constitutional due process.

    Writing for the majority, Justice O'Connor admitted that the reasonable doubt instructions contained language that was not entirely clear. However, she explained that, taken in context and viewed as a whole, the instructions adequately conveyed the concept of reasonable doubt.(2) Justice O'Connor's opinion greatly narrowed the scope of the Court's recent per curiam decision in Cage v. Louisiana,(3) the case upon which both petitioners had formulated their appeals. Justice O'Connor based her conclusion, as to the meaning of reasonable doubt and the phrases challenged by petitioners, upon a historical analysis of the reasonable doubt concept and upon eighteenth and nineteenth-century case law and texts.(4) Though expressing disapproval of the reasonable doubt instructions at issue in both Victor and in Sandoval,(5) Justice O'Connor stopped short of setting forth an exemplary jury instruction and thus failed to clear up the confusion as to what sort of instruction the Court would endorse outright.

    This Note begins by reviewing the concept of reasonable doubt and its historical development, both in case law and in treatises, placing special emphasis on the Court's relatively recent history of interpreting the reasonable doubt standard. Next, this Note finds fault with the Court's holding in both Sandoval and Victor, arguing that the Court has improperly narrowed the important constitutional safeguards upheld in Cage to the facts of Cage alone, leaving the states with no valuable guidance as to how to instruct on the concept of reasonable doubt. This Note also contends that the Court lowered the standard of proof necessary to convict a defendant by upholding these two convictions, even though the juries received ambiguous and misleading definitions of reasonable doubt. Finally, this Note explores the Court's motivation for such an about-face with respect to the tenets of Cage and discusses the likely ramifications of the Court's holding for the future of criminal jurisprudence.

  2. BACKGROUND

    1. REASONABLE DOUBT IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY

      The Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution requires the State to prove every element of a charged criminal offense beyond a reasonable doubt.(6) The reasonable doubt standard had its first documented beginnings in the eighteenth century in England and America. There are two frequently cited theories regarding the first appearance of the concept of reasonable doubt in English and American case law.

      On the one hand, Judge John Wilder May, a nineteenth-century editor and author of numerous treatises, concluded that, as far as he could determine, the reasonable doubt standard was first employed in the Irish treason trials in 1798.(7) During the trial of Rex v. Finney(8) in Dublin, the defense counsel stated that it "may...be considered a rule of law, that, if the jury entertain a reasonable doubt upon the truth of the testimony of witnesses given upon the issue they are sworn well and truly to try, they are bound" to acquit.(9) Citing this case, Judge May concluded that its use in Ireland predated its use in the United States.

      Alternatively, Professor Morano asserted that the English and American courts employed the reasonable doubt standard even earlier in the eighteenth century.(10) As an example, Professor Morano cited the language used in the Boston Massacre Trials of 1770. Arguing for the conviction of British soldiers who had fired into a crowd of Boston residents who were protesting British military presence in the colonies, counsel for the British Crown, Robert Treat Paine, stated:

      [I]f therefor in the examination of this Cause the Evidence is not sufficient to Convince you beyond reasonable doubt of the Guilt of all or of any of the Prisoners by the Benignity and Reason of the Law you will acquit them, but if the Evidence be sufficient to convince you of their Guilt beyond reasonable doubt the Justice of the Law will require you to declare them Guilty and the Benignity of the Law will be satisfied in the fairness and impartiality of their Tryal.(11)

    2. REASONABLE DOUBT IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY

      Despite the different theories as to the source of the concept, historians agree that the reasonable doubt standard did not become a fixture of American jurisprudence until the mid-nineteenth century.(12) By then, the reasonable doubt standard had become widely accepted as the accurate description of the degree of doubt necessary for acquittal of a criminal defendant.(13) State courts gradually accepted the reasonable doubt standard, each following its own time line in accepting it.(14) Studies of early decisions of the state courts have revealed that many state appellate courts did not require trial courts to use the reasonable doubt standard until after they had already begun to use it.(15) The standard's growing acceptance was concurrent with judicial attempts to explain the meaning of reasonable doubt.(16)

      In addition to its growing importance in case law, the reasonable doubt standard appeared frequently in nineteenth-century treatises. Dean Wigmore, in his treatise on evidence, stated that "[w]hen the risk of jury-doubt is exclusively on the prosecution, their belief must amount to a sense of being morally certain beyond any reasonable doubt, i.e. in favor of the prosecutor's contention."(17) Simon Greenleaf also referred to reasonable doubt in describing the amount of proof required in a criminal case, stating that facts are proven by satisfactory evidence which is "that amount of proof...which ordinarily satisfies an unprejudiced mind...beyond a reasonable doubt."(18)

      Through its repeated use in both case law and in legal treatises, reasonable doubt became, by the end of the nineteenth century, the uniformly applied standard for the degree of doubt necessary to acquit a defendant of a charged criminal offense. In addition, courts began to use jury instructions to ensure that jurors paid attention to the law pertinent to the case and did not merely follow popular opinion in deciding the guilt or innocence of the defendant.(19) In 1895, the Supreme Court decreed, in Sparf v. United States,(20) that the jury is required, in criminal cases, to follow the trial court's instructions on the law.(21)

    3. REASONABLE DOUBT IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY

      Although courts used the reasonable doubt standard extensively by the close of the nineteenth century, the United States Supreme Court did not give it constitutional status until its decision in In re Winship.(22) In Winship, the Court held that the "Due Process Clause protects the accused against conviction except upon proof beyond a reasonable doubt of every fact necessary to constitute the crime with which he is charged."(23) In reaching its position, the Court found that "[a]lthough virtually unanimous adherence to the reasonable-doubt standard in common-law jurisdictions may not conclusively establish it as a requirement of due process, such adherence does 'reflect a profound judgment about the way in which law should be enforced and justice administered.'"(24)

      The Court in Winship posited two purposes of the reasonable doubt standard to support its holding.(25) First, the reasonable doubt standard is a "prime instrument for reducing the risk of convictions resting on factual error" since the standard "provides concrete substance for the presumption of innocence."(26) The standard is necessary because the defendant in a criminal case "has at stake interests of immense importance, both because of the possibility that he may lose his liberty upon conviction and because of the certainty that he would be stigmatized by the conviction."(27) Second, the reasonable doubt standard is "indispensable to command the respect and confidence of the community in applications of the criminal law."(28) The reasonable doubt standard instills confidence in the community that the criminal justice system will not convict innocent people.(29)

      After the Supreme Court's decision in Winship secured constitutional status for the reasonable doubt standard, the Court's involvement in the reasonable doubt standard has largely been to define how and to what extent the reasonable doubt standard needs explaining. While it is well established that courts and juries must apply the reasonable doubt standard when determining the guilt or innocence of a criminal defendant,(30) neither the majority opinion nor the concurrence in Winship discussed whether the Constitution requires jury instructions defining the standard.(31) The Court in Taylor v. Kentucky(32) held that the trial court's refusal to give the defendant's requested instruction on the presumption of innocence constituted a violation of due process.(33) The Court further noted that if trial courts defined the reasonable doubt standard, the Constitution did not require any particular words to instruct the jury as to the appropriate burden of proof.(34)

      In handling constitutional challenges to specific reasonable doubt instructions, the Court in Francis v. Franklin(35) made it clear that it would consider "what a reasonable juror could have understood the charge as meaning."(36)

      In its evaluations of the constitutionality of reasonable doubt jury instructions, the Court has only once held that a reasonable doubt jury instruction given by a trial court violated due process. In Cage v. Louisiana,(37) the defendant appealed his conviction and death sentence for first-degree murder, arguing that the reasonable doubt jury instruction was unconstitutional. In a per curiam decision, the United...

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