The US Supreme Court has ruled in a per curiam opinion in Hedgpeth v. Pulido that a harmless error standard should be applied when evaluating a conviction based on a general verdict where the jury was given alternate theories, including an invalid one, notes the Jurist.

The US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit had ruled that it was a 'structural error,' and overturned the conviction. As the case progressed, both Pulido and the state of California came to agree that it should not have been labelled as 'structural error,' but Pulido argued that the Ninth Circuit had already engaged in the necessary harmless error analysis required by the 1993 Supreme Court decision in Brecht v. Abrahamson. The court found that no such analysis had been conducted and remanded the case back to the Ninth Circuit.
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