State v. Phimmachak

The jury convicted Vilasak Phimmachak of taking and riding in a motor vehicle without permission. *12He appeals, claiming that the trial court erred when it refused to instruct the jury that the State was required to prove he knew the car was stolen before getting into it. But because we agree with the trial court that such an instruction misstates the law, we affirm.

FACTS

The police lifted Phimmachak’s fingerprints from the driver’s side door of Malcolm Lord’s stolen pickup truck. The police found the abandoned truck just hours after Lord had reported it stolen from an Everett cinema parking…