City of Seattle v Patu :: 147 Wn2d 717
Category: Legal Theories and Doctrines
In a nutshell, the invited error doctrine is the rule that a defendant cannot manipulate the courts by planting an erroneous instruction to the jury for the sake of raising an appeal. If the error was invited, there is no standing for appeal. But the courts have been using this doctrine to bar appeals for errors that occurred even in good faith or in negligence. This is a bad precedence in that it circumvents due process when a defendant “proposes a jury instruction based on a presumptively constitutional source of law in good faith, but that source is later held to contain constitutional flaws.” [at 721]
In this case, portions of the municipal code under which the defendant was convicted, were later held to be unconstitutional. Portions of the jury instructions were patterned after the ordinance. Now Patu appeals. This is a case where the defendant could not possibly have known the instruction was erroneous.
Doctrines are guidelines for the courts, to be used with discretion. They are not law. When the court takes a hard line on a doctrine, and in this doctrine, when the error was not manipulated by the defendant, it sets a dangerous precedent. In other words, when the courts place a greater weight on conviction than on the administration of justice, we are all in trouble.
Rating the Usual Suspects:
| pass | Fox, Neil | |
| pass | Jackson, Christine | |
| pass | Johnson, Charles | |
| pass | Madsen, Barbara | |
| pass | Sanders, Richard | |
| fail | Agid, Susan | |
| fail | Alexander, Gerry | |
| fail | Bridge, Bobbe | |
| fail | Carr, Thomas A | |
| fail | Chambers, Tom | |
| fail | Greene, Richard | |
| fail | Grosse, C Kenneth | |
| fail | Ireland, Faith | |
| fail | Kennedy, Faye | |
| fail | MacInnes, Nicole | |
| fail | Owens, Susan | |
| fail | Smith, Charles |