State v. Hayes, Minn.S.Ct., 5/31/2013. A jury convicted Mr. Hayes of first degree murder while committing domestic abuse with a past pattern of domestic abuse, for the death of his girlfriend’s 13 month old son, Robert Azure, Jr. Mr. Hayes complained about the sufficiency of the state’s evidence; and on appeal he complained that the jury should have been instructed that a past pattern of domestic abuse required proof beyond a reasonable doubt of at least two prior acts of abuse and that the jury needed to agree unanimously on which two specific acts of past abuse were proven.
The number of prior acts of abuse were between four and twenty, depending on who was counting. Mr. Hayes wanted to distinguish prior acts of abuse against his adult romantic partner from acts against the kids. Justice G. Barry Anderson, writing for the majority, declines to adopt such a distinction and concludes that the state’s evidence of a past pattern of domestic abuse sufficed to support the conviction.
Turing to the jury instructions, reviewed for plain error, the court said that it had already rejected the claim that there must be at least two separate incidents of domestic abuse when it decided State v. Hokanson, 821 N.W.2d 340 (Minn. 2012). On his unanimity assertion, again, the court answered that question in State v. Crowsbreast, 629 N.W.2d 433 (Minn. 2001).
Justice Stras concurred in the result, but did a short riff on his sufficiency standard of review concerns. See State v. Silvernail.
Justice Paul Anderson dissented, joined by Justice Page. He thought that the testimony of the medical examiner came close to, if not actually invading the province of the jury to decide the facts. He also expressed his fears that juries are too easily flummoxed by expert testimony, in this case, the state medical examiner, all the more so when the prosecutor’s closing argument gets a bit carried away.
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