How have the courts interpreted jury instructions in a criminal case?

Defendant assigns as error the trial court's rejection of three jury instructions proposed by the defense. First, he contends the jury should have been instructed that the special circumstances of burglary-murder and robbery-murder should not be "double-counted" as factors in aggravation, because they arose from a single incident. As he acknowledges, we rejected this contention in People v. Pollock (2004) 32 Cal.4th 1153, 1195-1196 [13 Cal.Rptr.3d 34, 89 P.3d 353]. As in Pollock, the jury in the present case was instructed that "[t]he weighing of aggravating and mitigating circumstances does not mean a mere mechanical counting of factors on each side of an imaginary scale, or the arbitrary assignment of weights to any of them." He presents no reason to depart from our conclusion that "[t]here is no reasonable likelihood that a jury so instructed would be unduly influenced by the mere number of special circumstances, without regard to the character or quality of the conduct on which they were based. Accordingly, defendant's claim is lacking in merit." (Id. at p. 1196.)