People v. Bates

Summary

Randy W. and his nephew, M.H., were living in two separate trailers on property owned by Dwight B. Dwight, David Richard Bates (defendant), and several others visited Randy at his trailer and told him "it was moving day." Then M.H. pulled up in his vehicle. Dwight and the other men approached M.H. After some discussion, defendant pulled a gun from his pocket and shot M.H. in the head, killing him. The jury heard that D.C., Dwight's niece, went to the property some time before the deadly incident, and witnessed M.H. emerge from his trailer with a shotgun. Randy, M.H.'s uncle, conceded that at some point before the day of the shooting, he had seen M.H. and Dwight arguing and that M.H. had threatened Dwight. He also saw M.H. pull a shotgun from his trailer when Dwight had previously asked him to leave the property. Defense counsel requested a self-defense instruction that included language based on the following bracketed provision of CALCRIM No. 505: "If you find that [the victim] threatened or harmed the defendant [or others] in the past, you may consider that information in deciding whether the defendant's conduct and beliefs were reasonable]." The court denied the request and the jury found defendant guilty of voluntary manslaughter.

Affirmed. Evidence that a victim had previously threatened or harmed others is relevant to a defendant's claim of self-defense only if the defendant knew of the victim's prior threatening conduct. People v. Tafoya. Here, the trial court properly instructed the jury that to determine whether defendant's beliefs were reasonable, it had to "consider all the circumstances as they were known to and appeared to the defendant and consider what a reasonable person in a similar situation with similar knowledge would have believed." Because no evidence showed that M.H. had threatened defendant, or that defendant knew that M.H. had previously threatened others, the trial court rightly refused the give the more focused instruction that defendant requested. Given that defendant was unaware of the victim's prior threatening conduct, such conduct was not relevant to show defendant's state of mind for purposes of self-defense.

— Silva Demirjian