State v. Burns
Annotate this CaseAfter a jury trial, Defendant was convicted of two counts of aggravated criminal sodomy and two counts of aggravated liberties with a child. Defendant was sentenced to three consecutive life sentences, each with a mandatory forty-year prison term. The Supreme Court reversed Defendant's convictions and remanded for a new trial, holding (1) the jury was improperly instructed with inaccurate and misleading language used in an Allen-type instruction; (2) the prosecutor improperly appealed to the emotions of the jurors by asking them to protect child victims by supporting their version of the events; (3) the judge improperly responded to a jury question by informing the jury that the abuse had happened more than once; and (4) these cumulative errors prejudiced Defendant and denied him a fair trial.
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