California, United States of America
The following excerpt is from People v. Farfan, B277516 (Cal. App. 2018):
We will assume for the sake of argument that the trial court had a sua sponte duty to instruct the jury on involuntary manslaughter, on the theory that the killing occurred during the commission of grand theft, and that this duty applied to both defendants. There is no reasonable probability that defendants would have received a more favorable outcome in the absence of the error. (See People v. Breverman (1998) 19 Cal.4th 142, 165 ["the failure to instruct sua sponte on a lesser included offense in a noncapital case is, at most, an error of California law alone, and is thus subject only to state standards of reversibility . . . [and] such misdirection of the jury is not subject to reversal unless an
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examination of the entire record establishes a reasonable probability that the error affected the outcome"].)
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