State v. Belgarde

                                   166

  Submitted August 10, 2020, affirmed March 17, petition for review denied
                        July 15, 2021 (

)


                   STATE OF OREGON,
                    Plaintiff-Respondent,
                              v.
                GARY LYNN BELGARDE, JR.,
                    Defendant-Appellant.
                 Marion County Circuit Court
                    18CR10653; A169632
                               

   Donald D. Abar, Judge.
   Ernest G. Lannet, Chief Defender, Criminal Appellate
Section, and Erik Blumenthal, Deputy Public Defender,
Office of Public Defense Services, filed the brief for appellant.
   Ellen F. Rosenblum, Attorney General, Benjamin Gutman,
Solicitor General, and Jennifer S. Lloyd, Assistant Attorney
General, filed the brief for respondent.
  Before Armstrong, Presiding Judge, and Tookey, Judge,
and Aoyagi, Judge.
   PER CURIAM
   Affirmed.
Cite as 

 (2021)                            167

        PER CURIAM
         Defendant was found guilty by unanimous jury verdict on one count of felon in possession of a firearm and one
count of unlawful possession of a firearm. On appeal, in two
assignments of error, defendant claims that the trial court
(1) erred by denying a motion for judgment of acquittal, and
(2) plainly erred by providing jury instructions allowing
nonunanimous verdicts. We reject without written discussion the first assignment of error.
         In the second assignment, defendant asserts that
instructing the jury that it could return nonunanimous
verdicts constituted a structural error requiring reversal.
Subsequent to the United States Supreme Court’s ruling
in Ramos v. Louisiana, 

, 

, 

 (2020), the Oregon Supreme Court explained
that a nonunanimous jury instruction was not a structural
error that categorically requires reversal in every case.
State v. Flores Ramos, 

, 

 (2020).
Additionally, when, as here, the jury’s verdicts were unanimous despite the nonunanimous instruction, such erroneous instruction was “harmless beyond a reasonable doubt.”
State v. Ciraulo, 

, 

 (2020); see
also State v. Chorney-Phillips, 

, 

(2020) (declining to exercise discretion to review as plain
error an unpreserved nonunanimous instruction when the
verdict was unanimous). Therefore, we reject defendant’s
second assignment of error.
        Affirmed.