In an en banc decision issued Feb. 17 in the People v. Shockey case, the Colorado Supreme Court reversed the Court of Appeals decision. The Court upheld a second-degree murder conviction despite the jury’s contradictory special interrogatory finding that the defendant did not use or possess a deadly weapon.
The case arose from the 2017 killing of T.D., where the jury found Jacob Alexander Shockey guilty of second-degree murder but answered “no” to whether he used a deadly weapon, a finding relevant to sentencing enhancements. On appeal, a divided Court of Appeals vacated the conviction on the ground that the negative interrogatory was inconsistent with the guilty verdict.
The Supreme Court granted certiorari to address whether such an internal inconsistency negated an element of the offense. In its opinion, the Court held that use of a deadly weapon is not an element of second-degree murder under Colorado law and that the jury’s general verdict unambiguously reflected that the People proved the requisite elements of knowingly causing death. Accordingly, no legal or logical inconsistency rendered the verdict infirm, and the judgment of the Court of Appeals was reversed and remanded.