Update: I knew it. One reader emailed me to say that our appellate courts have approved truncated jury instructions for at least thirty years, and referred me to State v. Gainey, 355 N.C. 72 (2002), which collects some cases and states that the court "has discouraged needless repetition" during jury instructions. Original Post: One of the aspects of my job that's both a blessing and a curse is that I get to -- and have to -- read every published criminal law opinion by our appellate courts. The state supreme court released a new batch of opinions a few days ago, and I sat down with them yesterday. Today, I want to focus on State v. Garcell, and in a day or two, I'll have something to say about State v. Miller. Garcell was a capital case. Although the defendant raised a large number of issues, most of them were pretty thin. (Bob Farb's summary of the case was distributed via his listserv, to which you can subscribe here.) I want to focus on one tidbit from the case, and in particular, on its application outside the capital context. During the penalty phase, the defendant requested, and the trial judge agreed, to submit three statutory mitigating circumstances and twenty-four non-statutory mitigating circumstances. The judge instructed the jury as to each statutory mitigating circumstance individually, and then provided a single instruction about how the jury was to consider the non-statutory mitigating circumstances before simply reading a list of them. On appeal, the [...]
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