Is a failure to instruct on more than one essential element of the charged offense harmless?

In People v. Mil (2012) 53 Cal.4th 400 (Mil), the defendant argued that a trial court's failure to instruct on more than one essential element of the charged offense constitutes structural error and thus cannot be cured by a finding the omission is harmless. The court recognized that most constitutional errors can be harmless. As a consequence, unless the error is a defect that affects the very " ' "framework within which the trial proceeds" ' " (id. at p. 410), where an instruction omits multiple elements of the offense or special circumstance allegation "but the elements were uncontested and supported by overwhelming evidence, it would not necessarily follow that the trial was fundamentally unfair or an unreliable vehicle for determining guilt or innocence" (id. at p. 411).

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