People v. Gonzalez

While I am otherwise in agreement with the result and reasoning of the court in this case, I write separately because of my differing view on the defendant’s request that the court charge the jury that, since the evidence was wholly circumstantial, the facts from which the inferences were to be drawn had to “exclude to a moral certainty every other reasonable hypothesis” (emphasis supplied). Unlike the court’s brief memorandum, from which one might gather that the failure to charge the moral certainty formulation is a harmless *731omission of a desirable charge, it is one that should no longer be…