Alvarez V. People

The defendant, Pedro Patlan Alvarez, was convicted of second-degree assault after trial to a jury. The Colorado Court of Appeals affirmed in People v. Alvarez, 624 P.2d 358 (Colo. App. 1980), and we granted certiorari. The defendant challenges his conviction on three grounds. First, Alvarez argues that he was prejudiced by a juror's use of a dictionary to aid her in understanding terms contained in the jury instructions. Second, the defendant claims his due process rights were violated when the trial court received evidence that he had been identified by a witness as one of the assailants during an inadvertent "one-on-one showup" at the police station shortly after the crime. Finally, the defendant asserts that the trial court violated due process requirements in allowing two witnesses to testify that they recognized a photograph of the defendant, taken at the police station on the night of the incident, as the man they had seen assaulting the victim. Although we find that admission of the disputed identification evidence produced no constitutional defects, we agree that the juror's resort to a dictionary to determine the meaning of words found in a key instruction was reversible error. Accordingly, we reverse and remand for a new trial.