An Adams County judge failed to read the entirety of the relevant Colorado law to jurors in a homicide trial, which caused the Court of Appeals on Thursday to throw out the defendant’s second degree murder conviction.

“Because the definition provided to the jury failed to track the language of the statutory deadly weapon definition — indeed, it omitted a significant and material portion of the statutory definition — it was erroneous,” wrote Judge Michael H. Berger for the three-member panel.

According to court documents, Cesar Reyes-Marquez was working at an auto body shop in July 2010 when he and a coworker learned about a fight involving employees of a neighboring business. Angered, the coworker went to that business and began throwing bottles at the shop and the vehicle of one of the employees.

Gabriel Campos, Servando Morelos-Avila and Hugo Perada-Lopez heard the commotion and confronted the man. There was an altercation, which resulted in Reyes-Marquez shooting and killing Morelos-Avila. The other two men survived their gunshots.

A jury convicted Reyes-Marquez of second degree murder, attempted second-degree murder and first-degree assault, despite his claim that he was acting in self-defense of himself and his coworker.

Adams County District Judge Thomas R. Ensor gave the jury an instruction on self-defense, explaining that Reyes-Marquez was authorized to use physical force without retreating if he did so to defend himself or another person “from what he reasonably believed to be the use or imminent use of unlawful physical force by that other person.” Further, the defendant could use deadly force if he anticipated first- or second-degree assault, which could involve a deadly weapon.

Under Colorado law, a deadly weapon is a “firearm, whether loaded or unloaded; or … a knife, bludgeon, or any other weapon, device, instrument, material, or substance, whether animate or inanimate, that, in the manner it is used or intended to be used, is capable of producing death or serious bodily injury.”

In his instruction to the jury, however, Ensor omitted the non-firearm objects from the definition.

“The effect of the instruction is they only list one weapon,” said Marquez-Reyes’s attorney, Lynn Noesner, during the appeal. “Probably the layperson considers a knife a deadly weapon. But a broomstick is not obviously a deadly weapon. When you have an instruction that says, ‘Here’s the definition of a deadly weapon: firearm,’ I don’t think a layperson would realize that under the law, a fist, a foot, any kind of screwdriver, any kind of tool … can be deadly weapons as a legal matter.”

Berger, in the appellate court’s unpublished opinion, explained that the defendant’s self-defense claim depended upon a correct understanding of first- or second-degree assault. Reyes-Marquez said at trial that his assailants attacked him with non-firearm weapons. Ensor’s definition for the jury effectively lowered the prosecution’s burden of proof because “under the deadly weapon instruction, the tools carried by Campos, Morelos-Avila, and Perada-Lopez were not deadly weapons,” Berger wrote.

The panel rejected the contentions of the attorney general’s office, which argued the appeal, that jurors were free to interpret that deadly weapons included items other than firearms, and that jurors determined there to be no imminent assault on Reyes-Marquez.

Judge Matthew D. Grove, writing separately, did not think the deadly weapon instruction itself undermined Reyes-Marquez’s defense. However, because the trial judge’s instruction on self-defense was also “inconsistent with the governing statute” and “likely confusing to the jury,” he agreed with the outcome. Specifically, he took issue with Ensor telling the jury that the defendant had to be facing unlawful force or robbery or assault to use deadly force.

“This was error because it would have required the jury to find that, even if Reyes-Marquez reasonably perceived that he was about to be robbed or assaulted, he could not defend himself with deadly physical force unless he also had reasonable grounds to believe that he was in imminent danger of being killed or receiving great bodily injury,” Grove elaborated.

The court upheld Reyes-Marquez’s attempted murder and assault convictions because those did not hinge on an imminent first- or second-degree assault. The panel ordered a new trial for the second-degree murder charge.

According to Westword, the 2017 trial that resulted in the appeal was Marquez-Reyes’s second trial, which the Court of Appeals ordered after finding the district judge delivered yet another faulty jury instruction.

The case is People v. Reyes-Marquez.