People v. Ortiz

Judgment, Supreme Court, New York County (Jerome Hornblass, J.), rendered August 22, 1988, which convicted defendant, after a jury trial, of criminal sale of a controlled substance in the third degree and sentenced him to 4 Vz to 9 years’ imprisonment, unanimously reversed, on the law, and the matter remanded for a new trial.

The trial court erred when it refused to charge the defense of agency in this case, where a reasonable view of the evidence could have led the jury to conclude that defendant acted as a mere instrumentality of the buyer, thus supporting a theory of agency, which was the…