How have jury instructions been interpreted in a murder trial?

The instructions as a whole, however, were not misleading. "[T]he correctness of jury instructions is to be determined from the entire charge of the court, not from a consideration of parts of an instruction or from a particular instruction." (People v. Burgener (1986) 41 Cal.3d 505, 538, 224 Cal.Rptr. 112, 714 P.2d 1251.) " 'The absence of an essential element in one instruction may be supplied by another or cured in light of the instructions as a whole.' " (Id. at p. 539, 224 Cal.Rptr. 112, 714 P.2d 1251.) The trial court expressly referred to both the attempted murder and murder charges. It related voluntary intoxication to "specific intent or mental state," which would be defined "elsewhere in these instructions." The instructions correctly explained that, for the jury to find defendant guilty of first degree murder, it must find he acted with "deliberation and premeditation." They further explained that defendant's deliberation and premeditation to kill "must have been formed upon preexisting reflection and not upon a sudden heat of passion or other condition precluding the idea of deliberation...." A reasonable jury would have understood deliberation and premeditation to be "mental states" for which it should consider the evidence of intoxication as to either attempted murder or murder.