People v. Paulsell

McFarland, J. The defendant was convicted of robbery, and appeals from the judgment and from an order denying his motion for a new trial.

The judgment must be reversed and a new trial ordered on account of instructions given and refused upon the subject of reasonable doubt—a subject upon which we had hoped there would be no further difficulty, except where instructions had been presented upon that subject by the defendant. We have frequently held that where the well-known definition of reasonable doubt of Chief Justice Shaw in the Webster case had been given to the jury, we would be loth to reverse a judgment for the refusal of the court to give other instructions upon the subject; and we have frequently warned trial courts against departing to any considerable extent from that definition. In People v. Chun Heong, 86 Cal. 332, the court, through Beatty, O. J., said: “We cannot, however, abstain from again expressing the hope that the trial judges who have made use of this form of instruction will eventually see the propriety of returning to the approved definition, which, since the time of Chief Justice Shaw, has never been improved upon.” In People v. Karnaghan, 72 Cal. 610, we said: “For instance, [11]the definition—or, rather, description—of ‘reasonable doubt’ given by Chief Justice Shaw in the Webster case has been adopted by this court, and by nearly all American courts, as a statement of that mental condition sufficiently accurate. Therefore, where a nisi prius court had given the language used by Chief Justice Shaw, and had confined itself to such language, we would be slow to reverse the case, although other instructions upon the subject, not objectionable, had been asked by defendant and had been refused.” In People v. Lenon, 79 Cal. 629, we said: “Most instructions of courts on the old subject of reasonable doubt turn out to be erroneous when they ambitiously step outside of well-established bounds.” (See, also, People v. Lee Sare Bo, 72 Cal. 626.) If, in the case at bar, the court had given the instruction which has been so often approved by this court, and the point of appellant had been that other instructions were inconsistent with the said Shaw definition, then we would have been compelled to look closely into the other instructions to see if there was any such inconsistency which vras material. But, in the case at bar, it happens that the appellant himself asked the court to give said definition of reasonable doubt, which is found in the said Webster case, in the following language: “In the words of our own supreme court, a reasonable doubt is that state of the case which, after an entire comparison and consideration of all the evidence, leaves the minds of the jury in that condition that they cannot say that they feel an abiding conviction to a moral certainty of the truth of the charge”; and the court refused to give said instruction upon the ground that it was “given by the court elsewhere.” Of course, it was clearly error to refuse this instruction. It ought to have been given, even if the court intended to say anything further upon the subject. We do not feel ourselves called upon to critically examine what is claimed to be the equivalent of the said refused instruction, and to determine upon a close analysis whether what the court said was, in fact, the exact equivalent of