Background
Emily Ann Lamprecht was charged with reckless driving in Multnomah County after a police officer observed her swerving toward the officer’s marked patrol car while leaning out of her driver’s window to film the officer. The officer reported that the incident lasted one to two minutes and that at one point Lamprecht had to brake hard to avoid striking a vehicle in front of her.
At trial, Lamprecht requested that the court give a special jury instruction drawing on State v. Clark, 256 Or App 428 (2013), which would have told the jury that a driver is not reckless merely by violating general duties of a driver — for example, by speeding or running a stop sign — and that such conduct may constitute civil negligence but does not necessarily rise to criminal recklessness. The trial court declined, finding the instruction risked misleading or confusing the jury because the hypothetical examples (speeding, running a stop sign) were not at issue in the case and could be seen as the court commenting on the evidence. Instead, the court gave Uniform Jury Instruction 1037, which defines “recklessly” in full, including the conscious-disregard and gross-deviation standards. The jury convicted Lamprecht, and she appealed.
The Court’s Holding
The Oregon Court of Appeals affirmed the conviction in a per curiam nonprecedential memorandum opinion. The court held that the trial court did not err in refusing to give Lamprecht’s requested special instruction because the standard Uniform Jury Instruction 1037 already fully covered the substance of what the defense sought to convey. Citing State v. Roberts, 293 Or App 340, 345-46 (2018), the court reiterated that a trial court need not give a requested instruction when the instructions actually given adequately inform the jury of the applicable law and do not leave it confused or misled.
The court further noted that trial courts are not required to give “negative” or “converse” instructions that describe circumstances under which an element might not be established. Beyond that, the court agreed with the trial court’s on-the-ground concern: injecting hypothetical factual scenarios (speeding, running a stop sign) that were entirely absent from the actual evidence risked distracting or misleading the jury rather than clarifying the law.
Key Takeaways
- A trial court satisfies its instructional duty when the instructions given fully cover the legal substance of a defendant’s requested instruction; no additional “converse” instruction is required.
- Special jury instructions that rely on hypothetical facts not present in the case may be refused as potentially misleading, even if those hypotheticals appear in prior case law.
- Oregon’s Uniform Jury Instruction 1037 on recklessness — requiring conscious disregard of a substantial and unjustifiable risk constituting a gross deviation from the reasonable-person standard — was sufficient to guide the jury without supplemental negative examples.
- This is a nonprecedential memorandum opinion under ORAP 10.30 and may be cited only as that rule permits.
Why It Matters
For criminal defense practitioners in Oregon, Lamprecht illustrates the limits of using Clark-derived “converse” instructions to sharpen the distinction between civil negligence and criminal recklessness. While Clark remains good law for that doctrinal point, trial courts retain discretion to decline such instructions when the uniform instruction already covers the ground and the proposed examples could confuse rather than clarify.
More broadly, the decision reinforces the principle that the adequacy of jury instructions is evaluated holistically. Defense counsel seeking to contrast recklessness with mere negligence should be prepared to tailor any special instruction tightly to the facts actually in evidence, rather than relying on generic examples, if they want to preserve a viable appellate argument.