Reported / Citable
Background
On November 19, 2019, Jermaine Brim boarded a BART train in the East Bay and got into an altercation with another passenger, Oliver Williams. Over the course of a five-minute fight captured on surveillance cameras, Williams drew a knife and attempted to stab Brim. Brim eventually gained control of the knife and fatally stabbed Williams multiple times in the head and neck before fleeing the train. Williams died shortly afterward from his wounds.
Brim was charged with murder in Alameda County. At trial he testified that he acted in fear for his life, pointing to Williams’s use of the knife and his own lower IQ (measured at 78, placing him in the seventh percentile), which an expert said would impair his ability to regulate fear responses and reassess threats. The jury deliberated for three days, asking the court several questions about the law of self-defense.
The jury found Brim guilty of second-degree murder and found true the special allegations that he used a deadly weapon and personally inflicted great bodily injury. He was sentenced to 16 years to life. Brim appealed, arguing the trial court erred in how it answered one of the jury’s mid-deliberation questions about self-defense instructions.
The Court’s Holding
The First Appellate District reversed the murder conviction on the ground that the trial court abused its discretion under Penal Code section 1138 when it failed to answer the jury’s question about whether imperfect self-defense survived after CALCRIM No. 3474.
CALCRIM No. 3474 instructs jurors that “[t]he right to use force in self-defense continues only as long as the danger exists or reasonably appears to exist. When the attacker no longer appears capable of inflicting any injury, then the right to use force ends.” During deliberations, the jury asked whether imperfect self-defense could still apply even if the danger had ended under that instruction. The trial court simply referred the jury back to CALCRIM No. 571 (the imperfect self-defense instruction) without directly answering the question.
The Court of Appeal held this was error. Under California law, perfect self-defense (a complete acquittal) requires that the defendant both actually and reasonably believed deadly force was necessary. Imperfect self-defense — which negates malice and reduces the offense to voluntary manslaughter — requires only that the defendant actually believed it, even if that belief was unreasonable. The court held that CALCRIM No. 3474 addresses the objective-reasonableness element of perfect self-defense and has no application to imperfect self-defense. By refusing to give the jury a direct answer, the court left jurors with the misimpression that CALCRIM No. 3474 cut off both defenses simultaneously. Because substantial evidence supported the murder conviction, the People may retry Brim for murder; if they elect not to, the judgment must be modified to voluntary manslaughter.
Key Takeaways
- CALCRIM No. 3474 — which ends the right to use force once danger passes — applies only to perfect self-defense and does not also eliminate a defendant’s ability to claim imperfect self-defense.
- When a deliberating jury expressly asks a question that reveals confusion about the law, Penal Code section 1138 imposes a mandatory duty to give a meaningful answer, not just redirect jurors to already-given instructions.
- A trial court that simply tells a confused jury to “refer back to” prior instructions without resolving the specific confusion commits reversible error if the ambiguity is reasonably likely to have affected the verdict.
- Imperfect self-defense is a distinct doctrine that negates malice and reduces murder to voluntary manslaughter — and the prosecution bears the burden of disproving it beyond a reasonable doubt once substantial evidence of it has been introduced.
- Defense attorneys in cases involving claims of self-defense should be prepared to request explicit clarifying language when the court receives jury questions about how the self-defense instructions interact with each other.
Why It Matters
This decision is a significant reminder about the trial court’s duty to actively manage jury confusion during deliberations. When a deliberating jury asks a pointed legal question, the court’s job is not just to echo the original instructions — it must actually resolve the confusion. Trial lawyers on both sides of criminal cases will want to anticipate and flag tensions between CALCRIM instructions that address perfect and imperfect self-defense, particularly in cases where the defendant’s actions occur over an extended period and the danger could be argued to have waxed and waned.
More broadly, the case reinforces the practical importance of imperfect self-defense as a fallback in self-defense cases. Even where a jury finds that continued use of force was objectively unreasonable, a defendant who genuinely feared for his life may still avoid a murder conviction. For defendants with cognitive limitations or trauma histories — as here, where expert testimony described Brim’s diminished ability to regulate fear — imperfect self-defense can be the difference between a murder conviction and a voluntary manslaughter conviction with a substantially shorter sentence.