This page uses extracted PDF text. Text can misread numbers, dates or table columns. Check the PDF before quoting or interpreting it. Redacted areas remain redacted.
- 6 -
Instruction 22: An officer may not arrest someone in his home or on
the curtilage outside his home unless the officer secures an arrest
warrant. The attempted arrest of Mr. Berry was unlawful.
Instruction 23: Where an officer attempts an unlawful arrest, the
officer is an aggressor which gives the arrestee the right to use
self-defense to resist so long as the force used is reasonable.
Instruction 24: When the defendant undertook to arrest the decedent,
he lacked that authority, and thus, whatever force he used in his
attempt to effect the arrest was unlawful. The decedent was entitled
to resist the attempted unlawful arrest with such reasonable force as
was necessary to repel that being exercised by the officer in his
unwarranted undertaking.
After the trial court instructed the jury with respect to the law governing the case, both the
Commonwealth and Pearson’s counsel made closing arguments to the jury. The jury then retired to
deliberate and subsequently returned a verdict of guilty on the lesser-included offense of voluntary
manslaughter. The jury also convicted Pearson of entering property with the intent to damage.
Following a subsequent sentencing hearing, the trial court sentenced Pearson to ten years and twelve
months of incarceration with five years suspended. Pearson appealed.
II. ANALYSIS
A. Standard of Review
“[T]he ‘admissibility of evidence is within the discretion of the trial court,’ and an appellate
court will not reject such decision absent an ‘abuse of discretion.’” Williams v. Commonwealth, 71
Va. App. 462, 487 (2020) (quoting Tirado v. Commonwealth, 296 Va. 15, 26 (2018)). “The abuse
of discretion standard draws a line—or rather, demarcates a region—between the unsupportable and
the merely mistaken, between the legal error . . . that a reviewing court may always correct, and the
simple disagreement that, on this standard, it may not.” Jefferson v. Commonwealth, 298 Va. 1,
10-11 (2019) (alteration in original) (quoting Reyes v. Commonwealth, 297 Va. 133, 139 (2019)).
“[T]he abuse of discretion standard requires a reviewing court to show enough deference to a
primary decisionmaker’s judgment that the [reviewing] court does not reverse merely because it Jump to an indexed page (18 of 18)