Supreme Court Calls for Harmless Error Review of Wrong Guilt Theory
The U.S. Supreme Court has sent a jury instruction case back to a federal appeals court for an analysis of whether an error in felony murder instructions was harmless.
The per curiam opinion was the only decision of the day, SCOTUSblog reports. The Supreme Court said the improper instruction—one of three theories of guilt submitted to jurors—should not be treated as a structural error undermining the verdict.
The improper instruction said the jury could find California defendant Michael Robert Pulidio guilty of felony murder if he aided and abetted a robbery after a shooting that killed a gas station clerk, the blog says. The other instructions asked the jury to find guilt based on theories that Pulido aided the robbery during the shooting or that he shot the clerk himself.
The California Supreme Court had affirmed the conviction. The state court said the jury had found special circumstances in the case, indicating that it did not rely on the erroneous instruction. The San Francisco-based 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals overturned the verdict. It will now re-examine the case under the Supreme Court’s guidelines.
