Wording of Jury Instructions

Re “Say What, Your Honor?” Sept. 7: It sends chills up my spine to read that “from prosecutors’ point of view, you want jury instructions that won’t jeopardize convictions.” Jury instructions should facilitate the rendering of justice, not convictions. They should help jurors understand the law and enable them to return just verdicts rather than numb them into complacency and force (or allow) them to ignore the law and use their own standards of guilt or innocence.

I know from personal experience in a capital case that scrupulously adhering to jury instructions can mean the difference between life and death. We can no more tolerate having jurors making legal decisions with unclear directives than we can tolerate executing people without affording them competent lawyers and access to technology that could exonerate them. Change the language; justice demands it.

BARBARA JACKSON

Buena Park

*

I, along with most judges, certainly favor instructing jurors in simple language they can understand. However, in my experience, jurors do not have difficulty with the passive rather than the active voice or with syntax or with instructions explaining how they should go about their duties; rather, they have understandable difficulty with instructions defining the law they are to apply.

The criticism that jury instructions “mirror the law too closely” and are “modeled, word for word, after the stilted language of statutes or appellate opinions” ignores the fact that this is what the law is. How can any group of lawyers or judges substitute language they feel is “more appropriate” without becoming a law unto themselves? Making the law is the job of our Legislature and interpreting it the job of our appellate courts. It is most assuredly not the job of any committee. Further, many of the instructions contain language that has been approved and in some cases dictated verbatim by the appellate courts--this after years of conflicting decisions.

I think when our appellate courts have uniformly approved language defining the law, it is unwise, and a terrible waste of resources, to spend years determining whether some new language meets with similar approval. People should understand that a decision to change one word in any jury instruction defining the law carries with it the danger of reversing not just one jury’s verdict but the verdict of every jury that has been given that instruction. That’s why any change must come from the Legislature and the appellate courts. Finally, the Judicial Council did not want to work with the Superior Court jury instruction committees, which was never a problem; rather the council insisted on taking over the committees. The Superior Court resisted because it was proud of its committees’ efforts and wanted the committees to continue their work.

ROBERT T. ALTMAN

Judge, Superior Court, ret.

Los Angeles

Altman was a member of the Los Angeles County jury instruction committees for 15 years.