Legal Question in Criminal Law in Texas
Does a judge have to instruct a jury on a defendent,s plea as well as the proscutor,s charge or can he decide not to instruct the jury on the defendent's plea because he has a problem with the plea and only instruct on the proscutor's charge.
1 Answer from Attorneys
I'm not really sure what you mean. All jury charges have something very basic in them about whatever the plea is, but it seems like it's just maybe one or two sentences--it's not much, at any rate, because there's not really anything there for the jury to decide about the plea, and It seems like most of it actually just involves the presumption of innocence. If the defendant pleads not guilty, the only real result of that is that he's entitled to a trial and that the jury needs to consider whether the evidence presented establishes his guilt beyond a reasonable doubt. The rest of the charge is about things like what they have to agree on, how deliberations should be conducted, certain things that they can't consider or can only consider for specific purposes, and so on. The only thing I can think of that you might be talking about is maybe where the defendant has entered what could be a guilty or no contest plea, but there's something really off about the circumstances, and so the judge decides not to accept the plea and treat it as a not guilty plea. The same thing happens when the defendant just refuses to plead at all--the judge automatically treats that as a not guilty plea. I've never personally had a case like that, so I'm not sure, but I don't think anything much about that would end up in the charge, because an argument could be made that that would be commenting on things that should be left alone and be prejudicial to the defendant. If I misunderstood your question, you might want to ask it again.
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