 |
 |
to fill out a simple form to connect to DUI Lawyers in your area.
|
|
|
|
|
State v. Godsey11/29/2001
hat the reviewing court was able to describe the case before it in terms comparable to other capital cases." 28 S.W.3d at 924 (Birch, J., concurring and dissenting). The approach taken in Washington may be instructive. In Washington v. Pirtle, the Washington Supreme Court noted that quantifiable details such as the number of aggravating circumstances, victims, and prior convictions should be emphasized "in order to be objective as possible." 904 P.2d 245, 276 (Wash. 1995). Although the Pirtle court noted that proportionality is not a task reducible to statistics, it nonetheless emphasized that "numbers can point to areas of concern." Id.
Within the framework provided by Bland, objective criteria could be used to more clearly select which cases should be used for comparison, thus lessening the inclination to subjectively characterize cases in order to reach desired results. Many factors recorded in the trial court's Rule 12 report in first degree murder cases, such as the number and type of aggravating and mitigating factors found by the jury, the defendant and victim's age, race, and gender, the existence or lack of prior convictions, and the number of victims, may be objectively quantified. A case which does not share a significant number of these objective criteria should be used only in rare instances. While more subjective factors such as motive and manner of death may further refine the comparison, these factors are too malleable to justify primary reliance. Emphasis on objective factors would ensure consistency in the review protocol.
The scope of the analysis employed by the majority appears to be rather amorphous and undefined-expanding, contracting, and shifting as the analysis moves from case to case. The difficulties inherent in applying this protocol become evident when applied to the case under submission. The majority lists several factors that it considered in its proportionality analysis. Inter alia, it notes that (1) the defendant reacted violently when the victim would not stop crying; (2) the defendant inflicted serious, and ultimately fatal, injuries; (3) the defendant's conduct was not provoked or justified; (4) the victim was helpless; (5) the killing did not appear to be premeditated; (6) the defendant was caring for the victim while the victim's mother was at work; and (7) the defendant delayed seeking assistance for the victim. See Majority op. at ___. All of these factors, however, are also present in State v. Torres, one of the "death" cases the majority includes in its comparison pool. Indeed, except for one additional aggravating circumstance found by the jury and evidence that the victim in Torres suffered prior abuse, the two cases are remarkably similar.
While the victim in Torres may have suffered more serious abuse, the majority's conclusion that this case is "plainly lacking in circumstances" similar to Torres seems inconsistent with prior cases in which the majority has sometimes upheld death sentences by comparison to cases so widely divergent that they share no similarity but a single aggravating circumstance found by the jury. In State v. Bane, for example, the defendant was convicted of choking and stabbing an elderly victim during a planned robbery; the Court upheld the death sentence on a finding that the case was not "plainly lacking in circumstances" with such cases as State v. Vann, involving an eight-year-old victim killed during the perpetration of aggravated rape and incest; State v. Hall, involving a defendant who burned his ex-girlfriend to death after pouring gasoline on her while she was lying in the front seat of her car; and State v. Mann, involving the aggravated rape and murder of an elderly woman. See Bane, ___ S.W.3d at __
Page 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 Tennessee DUI Attorneys
DUI Lawyers
|
| |
to fill out a simple form to connect to DUI Lawyers in your area.
|
|