California, United States of America
The following excerpt is from People v. Ibarra, E056251 (Cal. App. 2014):
In People v. Kurtzman (1988) 46 Cal 3d 322, 330, the trial court gave a "loose paraphrase" instruction in response to a potentially hung jury, which said they had to unanimously agree whether the defendant was guilty of second degree murder before they could consider voluntary manslaughter. (Id. at p. 327.) The jury had asked if they could return a guilty verdict on manslaughter despite not reaching unanimity on murder. In that paraphrase, the court said, "Before you get to the other lesser included offenses, I want to find out if you have unanimously agreed on the original charge, which is murder
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