California Supreme Court· 8/31/1998

People v. Breverman

Citations

960 P.2d 1094
77 Cal. Rptr. 2d 870
19 Cal. 4th 142
98 Cal. Daily Op. Serv. 6812
98 Daily Journal DAR 9358
1998 Cal. LEXIS 5589

How courts have described this case

Verbatim parenthetical descriptions written by other courts when citing this decision. Ranked by citation-network relevance.

holding that “the failure to instruct sua sponte on a lesser included offense in a noncapital case is, at most, an error of California law alone, and is thus subject only to state standards of reversibility”
stating that a court has a duty to instruct sua sponte on a lesser included offense only if the offense is supported by substantial evidence
describing that '\[a] defendant who commits an intentional and unlawful killing but who lacks malice is guilty of.. . voluntary manslaughter'\ (alteration in original) (citations omitted)(quoting Barton, 12 Cal. 4th at 199)
emphasizing the “sharp distinction” between instructions on defenses and those on lesser included offenses
“[H]eat of passion and unreasonable self-defense reduce an intentional, unlawful killing from murder to voluntary manslaughter by negating the element of malice that otherwise inheres in such a homicide.”
trial court must charge with respect to lesser included offenses only when \substantial evidence\ exists from which rational jurors could conclude that the lesser offense, but not the greater, was committed

Source: CourtListener parenthetical corpus (CC0).

Judges: Baxter, Mosk, Brown

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Cited by

387 cases in this archive cite this case; the 20 most cited are listed.

Cites

90 cases in this archive are cited by this case; the 20 most cited are listed.

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