California, United States of America
The following excerpt is from People v. Gomez, 240 Cal.Rptr.3d 315, 430 P.3d 791, 6 Cal.5th 243 (Cal. 2018):
" When an appellate court addresses a claim of jury misinstruction, it must assess the instructions as a whole, viewing the challenged instruction in context with other instructions, in order to determine if there was a reasonable likelihood the jury applied the challenged instruction in an impermissible manner. " ( People v. Jennings (2010) 50 Cal.4th 616, 677, 114 Cal.Rptr.3d 133, 237 P.3d 474, quoting People v. Wilson (2008) 44 Cal.4th 758, 803804, 80 Cal.Rptr.3d 211, 187 P.3d 1041.) The trial court's prohibition on "biblical references" followed its instruction that "you're not to bring anything to the deliberation process," suggesting that the jury understood the instruction as a whole as forbidding extrinsic sources of law or evidenceof which biblical references were merely an exampleduring deliberations. This conclusion is supported by the trial court's statement that he wanted to "emphasize again as I've done before." The jury was likely to understand this statement as a reference to the court's guilt phase instruction that the jury "cannot refer to" "a religious text of some kind, a bible or something like that" because it is "outside information."
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