Friday, May 15, 2026
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Court of Appeal:
One-Sentence Add-on to Jury Instruction Requires Reversal of Murder Conviction
By a MetNews Staff Writer
A judge’s one sentence addition to a CALCRIM instruction on voluntary manslaughter has resulted in the reversal of as conviction for second-degree murder, under a decision of the Court of Appeal for this district, filed yesterday.
Justice John Shepard Wiley Jr. wrote for Div. Eight in ordering that the conviction of Steven Wilmot be vacated, with a remand for further proceedings. Sparking the reversal was this sua sponte instruction which Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Gregory A. Dohi tacked on to the wording of CALCRIM 570:
“If you find that Mr. Wilmot unintentionally killed Mr. Washington because of a sudden quarrel or in the heat of passion as I’ve defined those terms, or, as I’ll define later, in an honest but unreasonable belief in self-defense, you may find him guilty of voluntary manslaughter.”
The written instruction, as provided jurors, had the word “unintentionally” underlined.
Wiley’s Opinion
Wiley wrote:
“The trial court’s modification inadvertently introduced error into the instruction, for it implied that jurors should not find Wilmot guilty of voluntary manslaughter if they believed he intentionally killed Washington. This implication is contrary to law: an intentional killing in the heat of passion can indeed be voluntary manslaughter.”
He went on to say:
“To introduce the vague concept of ‘unintentional’ into the correct and precisely-worded text of CALCRIM No. 570 was error. Without supporting context, ‘unintentional’ is an ambiguous word because it has different meanings. This ambiguity is mischievous in a legal field where precision is crucial. It caused mischief here.
“For instance, a purely blameless killing can be ‘unintentional.’ In that situation, there is no crime at all.”
The jurist gave as an example of a blameless killing a driver, acting in conformity with laws, hitting a pedestrian who darted into traffic, with a death resulting.
He expressed a concern that jurors could construe the reference to “unintentionally” as meaning that, to find the killing by Wilmot of vagrant drug-peddler during “a six-minute series of encounters,” the homicide must have been blameless.
People v. Lasko
Long’s aim was to conform the instruction to the California Supreme Court’s 2000 opinion in People v. Lasko. There, then-Justice Joyce Kennard, now retired, wrote:
“When a killer intentionally but unlawfully kills in a sudden quarrel or heat of passion, the killer lacks malice and is guilty only of voluntary manslaughter. We hold here that this is also true of a killer who, acting with conscious disregard for life and knowing that the conduct endangers the life of another, unintentionally but unlawfully kills in a sudden quarrel or heat of passion.”
Wiley said:
“The Lasko court said nothing about blamelessly accidental killings….The Lasko court certainly did not hold that a blameless state of mind was necessary before a jury could find Wilmot guilty of voluntary manslaughter instead of murder. Yet that was the unfortunate implication of the paragraph the trial court added to CALCRIM No. 570 here.
“The added paragraph thus was legal error. By unduly narrowing the circumstances under which the jury could convict Wilmot of voluntary manslaughter, the instruction incorrectly restricted the jury’s latitude to rule in Wilmot’s favor in his bid for the lesser offense of voluntary manslaughter.”
The error was not harmless, he said, because “the facts allowed the potential for a finding of reckless homicide”—voluntary manslaughter—“and it was this potential that the erroneous paragraph closed off.”
The case is People v. Wilmot, B338493.
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