The Alaska Court of Appeals has overturned an Anchorage man’s attempted murder conviction after finding that the trial judge improperly instructed jurors before they convicted the man.
In a written order published Friday, the court reversed the conviction of Rigoberto Guillermo Walker and said that prosecutors may elect to retry him for attempted murder.
If the case is not retried, Walker will still be guilty of first-degree assault and may be sentenced for that crime.
Walker was the perpetrator of a shocking 2019 incident when he stabbed a 74-year-old woman at random outside an assisted living facility.
According to prosecutors, Walker approached the woman, who was using a walker while she was gardening, began cursing at her, then attacked her with a knife.
Walker, who was on probation for other assaults at the time, had numerous prior convictions, including four for arson, and was convicted at trial in 2022.
Before jurors deliberated in that trial, the judge issued the jury instructions that said in part, “unless the contrary appears from the evidence, the jury may draw the inference that the accused intended all the consequences which one standing in like circumstances and possessing like knowledge should reasonably have expected to result from any act knowingly done or knowingly omitted by the accused.”
That was a mistake, because the Alaska Supreme Court ruled in 1978 that judges should not use that particular jury instruction, known as the “Mann instruction.” It’s named after the federal case that struck it down, because it can prejudice a jury against the defendant by shifting the burden of proof regarding the accused person’s intent from the prosecution to the defense.
Walker’s attorney objected to the language, but prosecutors argued in favor, incorrectly saying that the Supreme Court and appeals court had approved it.
Writing in last week’s order, the appeals court said that the confusion is understandable, because in some cases it has found the use of that prejudicial jury instruction to be harmless.
In addition, the state changed some standard jury instructions a few years ago.
While other uses of that old language were found to be harmless, it was not harmless in Walker’s case, the court ruled.
“Here, Walker was convicted of a specific intent crime in a trial where the sole contested issue in relation to the attempted murder charge was whether Walker acted with the specific intent to kill,” wrote Judge Marjorie Allard on behalf of the court.
“Moreover, the potential prejudice caused by the Mann instruction was amplified by the fact that the prosecutor expressly referred to the instruction in closing argument and used the instruction to argue the State’s theory of specific intent. Under these circumstances, we cannot say that the giving of the Mann instruction — an instruction condemned by the Alaska Supreme Court nearly five decades ago — was harmless beyond a reasonable doubt.”