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Key v. People1/31/1986
. Franklin, 471 U.S. 307, 105 S. Ct. 1965, 85 L. Ed. 2d 344 (1985), a prisoner shot and killed the resident of a nearby home while attempting to escape from custody after receiving treatment at a local dentist's office. The respondent prisoner had demanded the keys to the victim's car. As the victim was slamming his front door shut, the respondent's gun discharged. The bullet pierced the wooden door and struck the victim, inflicting a fatal chest wound.
The respondent was tried on a charge of malice murder. His sole defense was the lack of the requisite intent to kill, claiming that the homicide was an accident. Due to the ambiguous nature of the jury instruction on the pivotal issue of intent, the jury requested reinstruction on the intent element and the definition of accident. The jury returned a guilty verdict, and the respondent was sentenced to death. The Supreme Court held that the instruction on intent, when read in the context of the jury charge as a whole, violated the fourteenth amendment's due process requirement that the state prove each element of a criminal offense beyond a reasonable doubt.
The precise issue before the Court was "whether the challenged jury instruction had the effect of relieving the State of the burden of proof enunciated in Winship on the critical question of . . . state of mind by creating a mandatory presumption of intent. . . ." Francis v. Franklin, 105 S. Ct. at 1971 (citations omitted). The Court found that, standing alone, the challenged language undeniably created an unconstitutional burden-shifting presumption with respect to the element of intent. It then examined the jury instructions taken as a whole to ascertain whether there was sufficient clarifying language to explain the proper allocation of the burdens of proof and persuasion. The Court determined that the charge could be read as instructing the jury that it was required to infer the intent to kill as a natural and probable consequence of the act of firing the pistol unless the respondent persuaded the jury that such an inference was unwarranted. Because a reasonable juror could have interpreted the challenged portions of the jury instructions as creating a mandatory presumption that shifted the burden of persuasion on the crucial element of intent to the defendant, the Court held that the critical instruction on intent and the instructions as a whole did not "comport with the requirements of the Due Process Clause." Francis v. Franklin, 105 S. Ct. at 1977.
The legal issue in the case before us is strikingly similar to that involved in Francis v. Franklin. In each of these cases, the theory of the defense was a lack of the requisite intent to kill. Both involved ambiguous jury instructions on the dispositive issue of intent. Both jury charges arguably had the effect of permitting the jury to find the defendant guilty upon a showing by the prosecution of a lesser degree of culpability than that required by the applicable statute. The jury in each case requested reinstruction on the intent element.
Thus, as in Francis v. Franklin, it is not clear that the instructions, taken as a whole, informed the jury that it could convict the defendant of first-degree murder only if the prosecution proved beyond a reasonable doubt that Key's intent to kill his friend was formed after the exercise of reflection and judgment and not in a hasty or impulsive manner. Confronted with the erroneous language in Instruction No. 15 that deliberation may occur in an "interval sufficient for one thought to follow another," a reasonable juror could easily have read these words as contradicting the preceding instruction, which correctly stated that an act committed after deliberation is never one wh
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