A Richmond man who was once sentenced to life in prison for a Halloween-night killing has instead agreed to serve 17 years and eight months, after an appellate court found the trial judge failed to properly instruct jurors on self-defense. Thadeus Colley, now 50, pleaded no contest to voluntary manslaughter in the 2018 shooting death of 42-year-old Jamaa Anderson, closing out a case that had already sent him to prison once under a since-overturned murder conviction.
According to The Mercury News, Anderson was shot around 1:40 a.m. on November 2, 2018, on the 3100 block of Deseret Drive in Richmond, following a fight with Colley over an iPad. He was taken to a hospital but died later that same day. Richmond police arrested Colley about a week later, on November 9, 2018, publicly crediting community support and detective work for cracking the difficult Halloween-weekend case, per SFGATE.
Colley was convicted of murder in 2019 and sentenced to life in prison in 2021, court records show. But that same year, an appellate court ruled that the trial judge should have instructed the jury on the possibility that Colley acted in self-defense — a decision that ultimately unraveled the conviction.
How a Jury Instruction Flipped the Case
The legal issue centers on what California law calls imperfect self-defense, a doctrine under Penal Code Section 192 that reduces a murder charge to voluntary manslaughter when a defendant kills based on an honest but objectively unreasonable belief that deadly force was necessary to prevent imminent death or great bodily harm, according to the Shouse Law Group. California appellate courts treat a trial judge’s failure to give that instruction, when supported by substantial evidence, as prejudicial error reviewed under the People v. Watson standard, the San Francisco Criminal Lawyer Blog explains…