Background
Whitney Lee Castleberry was the sole leaseholder of a Maricopa County apartment where she lived with Joe (a pseudonym), her on-and-off partner and the father of her child. Joe was not on the lease but paid rent to Castleberry and kept belongings there. He had previously kicked in the front door during an altercation, leading to his arrest. In May 2021, after discovering evidence of infidelity on Joe’s phone, Castleberry told him to leave. He struck her—elbowing her in the head and slapping her face—then left. She locked the door behind him. Joe returned after drinking all night and began pounding on the door with increasing intensity. Fearing he would break it down again, Castleberry retrieved a firearm. When she cracked the door open, Joe shoved it into her, causing her to stumble backward. She fired once; Joe died from the wound.
The State charged Castleberry with second-degree murder. At trial, she raised five justification theories: self-defense, defense of others, defense of premises, defense of a residential structure, and a domestic-violence justification. The superior court gave all five instructions but, at the State’s request, added a sentence to the defense-of-premises instruction drawn from State v. Reaves: “A person who has an absolute and unlimited right to be in a dwelling cannot commit a criminal trespass thereof.” The court also instructed the jury on civil Landlord-Tenant Act definitions—landlord, tenant, rental agreement, and the rule limiting a landlord’s ability to forcibly remove a tenant. Additionally, the court denied Castleberry’s request for the statutory presumption instruction under A.R.S. § 13-419, which would have presumed her belief in the necessity of deadly force to be reasonable. After a thirteen-day trial, the jury rejected all five justification theories and convicted her of second-degree murder. The superior court sentenced her to fifteen years in prison.
Castleberry timely appealed, challenging all three rulings: the modified defense-of-premises instruction, the Landlord-Tenant Act instructions, and the denial of the § 13-419 presumption instruction.
The Court’s Holding
The Court of Appeals vacated the conviction and remanded for a new trial on all three grounds. First, the court held that the modified defense-of-premises instruction was legally erroneous. The phrase “absolute and unlimited right” does not appear in A.R.S. § 13-407 or the standard Arizona jury instruction. It was borrowed from Reaves, which involved a defendant’s right not to be prosecuted for burglarizing his own home—a shield for defendants, not a sword against them. By flipping that principle to establish that Joe could not trespass because he had a right to be there, the instruction replaced the proper factual inquiry (whether Castleberry reasonably believed Joe was trespassing) with a legal conclusion about Joe’s property status. That misdirection directly contradicted State v. Ewer, which requires jury instructions to focus on the defendant’s reasonable belief, and State v. Brown, which holds that domestic-violence justification defenses apply regardless of whether the parties shared a home.
Second, the court held that the Landlord-Tenant Act instructions had no place in a criminal trial. The Act governs civil tenancy disputes and cross-references only civil statutes, not the criminal code. The “Recovery of Possession Limited” instruction—telling the jury a landlord cannot forcibly remove a tenant—converted what should have been a factual reasonableness inquiry into a legal bar on Castleberry’s use of force. The State’s closing argument compounded the harm by expressly urging that Castleberry’s landlord status defeated all five of her justification theories, not just defense of premises. The State failed to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that these combined errors did not contribute to the verdict.
Third, the court held that the superior court abused its discretion by denying the § 13-419 presumption instruction. Under Brown, an invitee who exceeds the scope of his invitation becomes a trespasser, and the record contained far more than the “slightest evidence” needed to support the instruction: Castleberry testified she was scared; a detective corroborated a fresh bruise on her forehead; Joe had previously broken the door down; and he returned uninvited after she told him to leave and locked the door. The court further held that defense counsel’s off-the-cuff statement that Joe was at least an invitee was a factual observation, not a legal concession, and could not justify the court’s unilateral legal conclusion that the § 13-419(C)(1) exception applied as a matter of law.
Key Takeaways
- Jury instructions on justification defenses must keep the focus on the defendant’s reasonable belief at the moment force was used—not on the victim’s legal status as a tenant, co-resident, or licensee.
- Civil landlord-tenant law definitions and eviction procedures are categorically inapplicable in criminal trials involving justification defenses; importing them risks converting a factual question into an erroneous legal disqualification.
- The “absolute and unlimited right” language from Reaves/Altamirano protects defendants from prosecution—it cannot be weaponized by the State to strip a defendant of her defense-of-premises claim by attributing a superior right to the victim.
- An invitee who exceeds the scope of his invitation may become a trespasser under Arizona law, and even slight evidence of that fact entitles a defendant to the § 13-419 presumption instruction.
- A defense attorney’s evidentiary assessment at oral argument does not constitute an invited-error waiver, particularly when it is the court—not the defendant—that introduced the legal question.
Why It Matters
This decision has significant implications for domestic-violence cases in Arizona where the parties share or have shared a residence. Courts and prosecutors may no longer use a victim’s residential status—whether as a co-tenant, informal occupant, or paying guest—to foreclose a defendant’s justification defenses as a matter of law. Under the court’s reasoning, co-habitation is simply evidence for the jury to weigh in assessing the reasonableness of the defendant’s belief; it is not a legal trump card that eliminates the right to use force in self-defense or defense of premises. Combined with the Arizona Supreme Court’s recent decision in Brown, this opinion reinforces a clear statutory and judicial policy that the availability of domestic-violence justification defenses does not turn on who holds the lease.
The ruling also serves as a warning to trial courts about the risks of embellishing standard jury instructions with language borrowed from analytically distinct contexts. The error here began with a single imported sentence that reframed the entire trial, ultimately tainting all five justification theories and requiring reversal of a second-degree murder conviction after a thirteen-day trial. Defense practitioners should closely scrutinize proposed modifications to standard justification instructions, while prosecutors should be cautious about introducing civil-law frameworks into criminal proceedings where they may distort the jury’s factual role.