Drive-By Shooting Appeal Reaches Supreme Court on Jury Instruction Issue
The U.S. Supreme Court has agreed to review a federal appellate ruling that found a Seattle man convicted in state court of a drive-by shooting deserved a new trial because of flawed jury instructions.
The issue in Waddington v. Sarausad is whether federal courts on habeas review are required to defer to state court court findings about the adequacy of jury instructions, SCOTUSblog reports.
The defendant, Cesar Sarausad, said he didn’t know the front-seat passenger in his car had a gun or that he planned to use it to kill a 16-year-old high school student, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer reported last year. The San Francisco-based 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that flawed jury instructions were vague and improperly allowed jurors to convict Sarausad of murder even if he didn’t know of his passenger’s plans. The instructions on accomplice liability mirrored the state statute and had been upheld by state courts.
The cert petition (PDF filed by SCOTUSblog) claims the 9th Circuit improperly rejected the state court’s review of the jury instructions and substituted its own judgment.
“By concluding that an ambiguity and other factors created a reasonable likelihood that the jury misapplied the instructions, the 9th Circuit too readily disregarded the state court’s determination that the judge properly instructed Sarausad’s jury and too easily found a constitutional error,” the state of Washington’s cert petition said.
