California, United States of America
The following excerpt is from People v. McCulley, C075333 (Cal. App. 2015):
The People urge us to apply the principle under which the failure to instruct on unanimity is harmless where the acts are so closely related in time and place that a jury could not reasonably have distinguished among them and therefore must have believed or rejected the evidence in toto, or there was only a single defense offered; we agree with defendant that this principle does not apply here where different witnesses testified about different acts. (People v. Melendez (1990) 224 Cal.App.3d 1420, 1430-1431.) The jury had at least three different conflicts to resolve: whether to credit defendant's explanation for the broken window or the prosecution's circumstantial alternative; whether to believe the passenger's original account or his testimony at trial; and which of the actions the passenger attributed to defendant to acceptpointing the gun at him, pointing the gun at the rear window, or pointing the gun outside the car.
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