Background
Denver police attempted to stop a stolen Jeep driven by Jeffery Sloan. Sloan accelerated away, ran stop signs, and traveled at high speed. Officers called off the pursuit for safety reasons. About thirty seconds later and roughly a mile away, the Jeep ran a red light at sixty to seventy-five miles per hour and struck an Uber vehicle, killing its driver and passenger.
The prosecution charged Sloan with vehicular eluding and sought the statutory enhancement for eluding that results in death, which raised the offense from a class 5 to a class 3 felony. Sloan’s defense was mistaken identity: he maintained that he was not the Jeep’s driver. He did not dispute at trial that the eluding resulted in the deaths, and he did not object when the verdict-form interrogatory instead asked whether “the accident” resulted in death. The court of appeals found plain error and reversed the class 3 felony conviction.
The Court’s Holding
The Colorado Supreme Court reversed. It agreed that the interrogatory misstated the statutory enhancement, which requires proof that the vehicular eluding—not merely the accident—resulted in death. But the unobjected-to instructional error did not constitute plain error because the causal issue was not contested at trial.
Under Colorado’s plain-error standard, an erroneous instruction ordinarily does not affect substantial rights when it concerns an uncontested issue or when the evidence of guilt is overwhelming. Sloan contested only whether he was the driver. The record also showed an uninterrupted sequence from his flight from police to the fatal crash; the officers’ decision to stop pursuing him did not itself end his eluding. The court remanded for the court of appeals to return the case to the district court to correct an unrelated mittimus issue.
Key Takeaways
- An unobjected-to instructional error concerning an uncontested issue does not ordinarily amount to plain error.
- The plain-error analysis is disjunctive: an uncontested issue or overwhelming evidence can defeat a claim that an instructional error affected substantial rights.
- Police ending a pursuit does not necessarily end a defendant’s vehicular eluding when the defendant continues fleeing recklessly.
Why It Matters
The decision reinforces Colorado’s demanding plain-error rule for jury-instruction challenges raised for the first time on appeal. Defendants must show more than an obvious instructional mistake; they must show a reasonable possibility that it affected the verdict.
For vehicular-eluding cases, the ruling rejects an automatic rule that a defendant’s eluding ends when officers discontinue active pursuit. The relevant inquiry is whether the defendant was still eluding or attempting to elude officers when the fatal event occurred.