Stephanie Simon, Out With the Old and in With the New: A review of the latest revisions of the Seventh Circuit's accomplice liability jury instructions, 2025 Wis. L. Rev. 1655 (2025).
Somewhere in a United States district court courtroom, a panel of jurors was recently instructed on the law to apply in deciding the fate of a criminal defendant. In some cases, the wording of a single instruction may dictate the jury’s ultimate verdict. The instructions the jury is given are likely the first and only time the jurors learn the law on which their decision—whether to convict or acquit—will be based. If the law presented in the jury instructions is inaccurate, inaccessible, or unclear to even one juror, there is a chance that a defendant will be found guilty or innocent when they might not have been otherwise.
In 2023, the Seventh Circuit published the most recent version of its pattern jury instructions. The Committee on Federal Criminal Jury Instructions of the Seventh Circuit added two new accomplice liability instructions, intended to be revisions of the prior version, instruction 5.06. The new instructions, 5.06(A) and 5.06(B), are a welcome revision of the instructions contained in 5.06(a) and (b) because they summarize the law more accurately, respond to changes within Seventh Circuit case law, and more closely align the Seventh Circuit with the other circuits’ tested accomplice liability instructions. While these changes are necessary corrections of flaws within the 5.06 instructions, the Committee failed to remove the older erroneous version despite indications that 5.06 caused confusion and proved problematic. This oversight jeopardizes the efficacy of the revisions. Furthermore, while the revisions present the law more accurately, the Committee failed to supply a workable definition of the ambiguous legal term, “willfully”—a word that is central to the new instruction. In the next version of the Seventh Circuit’s pattern jury instructions, it is imperative that the Committee supply a standard definition of this term.
