Friday, December 22, 2017

Instructing Jurors on Reasonable Doubt: It's All Relative

The worst part of Wisconsin's reasonable-doubt jury instruction 140 is its closing mandate telling jurors "not to search for doubt" but instead "to search for the truth."  But while that's the most serious of the instruction's offenses, it turns out to be just one of many.  You can read all about the instruction's other burden-lowering defects, and learn how jurors should be instructed, in my new article Instructing Jurors on Reasonable Doubt: It's All Relative, 8 California L. Rev. Online 72 (2017).

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