Case Title: Ex Parte McNabb

Citation: 887 So. 2d 998

Docket Number: 1021364

State: alabama

Court: Alabama Supreme Court

Date: 2004-03-05T00:00:00Z

Document:
887 So. 2d 998 (2004)
Ex parte Torrey Twane McNABB.
(In re Torrey Twane McNabb v. State of Alabama).
1021364.

Supreme Court of Alabama.
March 5, 2004.
Rehearing Denied April 30, 2004.
*999 Morris S. Dees, Montgomery; and Thomas M. Goggans, Montgomery, for petitioner.
William H. Pryor, Jr., atty. gen.; Nathan A. Forrester and Margaret Mary Fullmer, deputy attys. gen.; and J. Clayton Crenshaw, asst. atty. gen., for respondent.
WOODALL, Justice.
Torrey Twane McNabb sought certiorari review of the judgment of the Court of Criminal Appeals affirming his convictions and sentence for capital murder and attempted murder. We granted his petition to review whether the trial court erred in giving the jury instructions in the sentencing phase of his capital-murder trial. We affirm.
The underlying facts of this case are fully set forth in the opinion of the Court of Criminal Appeals, McNabb v. State, [Ms. CR-98-0967, October 26, 2001] 887 So. 2d 929, 939 (Ala.Crim.App.2001), and need not be repeated. McNabb was convicted on January 8, 1999, in the Montgomery Circuit Court on two counts of capital murder for the murder of Montgomery Police Officer Anderson Gordon. *1000 The murder was made capital by Ala.Code 1975, § 13A-5-40(a)(5), which makes capital the "[m]urder of any police officer ... while such officer... is on duty, regardless of whether the defendant knew or should have known the victim was an officer ... on duty, or because of some official or job-related act or performance of such officer," and § 13A-5-40(a)(17), which makes capital "[m]urder committed by or through the use of a deadly weapon while the victim is in a vehicle."
By a vote of 10 to 2, the jury recommended a sentence of death. The trial court accepted the jury's recommendation, and sentenced McNabb to death. The Court of Criminal Appeals affirmed the convictions and sentence.
McNabb challenges the jury instructions given during the sentencing phase of his trial. The court bifurcated the jury charge at the sentencing phase, giving instructions both before the presentation of evidence and after closing arguments. McNabb did not object to the timing or the content of the instructions.
The court gave the following pertinent instructions at the beginning of the sentencing phase:
(Emphasis added.)
After the presentation of evidence and closing arguments, the trial court gave a "supplemental" jury charge, stating, in pertinent part:
Because McNabb did not object to the instructions, they are reviewed for "plain error," that is, an error "`that "seriously affect[s] the fairness, integrity or public reputation of judicial proceedings."'" Ex parte Davis, 718 So. 2d 1166, 1173-74 (Ala.1998) (quoting Kuenzel v. State, 577 So. 2d 474 (Ala.Crim.App.1990), quoting in turn United States v. Young, 470 U.S. 1, 105 S. Ct. 1038, 84 L. Ed. 2d 1 (1985)).
McNabb challenges the jury instructions on three grounds. First, he argues that they "ran afoul of Ala.Code § 13A-5-46 as interpreted ... in Ex parte Bryant, [Ms. 1990901, June 21, 2002] ___ So.2d ___ (Ala.2002)," by erroneously suggesting to the jury that it could not recommend life imprisonment as a sentence "unless the mitigating circumstances outweighed the aggravating circumstances." McNabb's brief, at 30 (emphasis added). Second, he contends that the instructions did not ensure that all 12 jurors found the existence of any one of the three aggravating factors on which the trial court based its sentence. Consequently, he insists, the sentence did not comply with Ring v. Arizona, 536 U.S. 584, 122 S. Ct. 2428, 153 L. Ed. 2d 556 (2002). Third, he argues that it was plain error to bifurcate the jury instructions by charging the jury both before and after the presentation of evidence and closing arguments. We first address the manner in which the jury was instructed to weigh the aggravating and mitigating circumstances.
McNabb contends that the court's instructions did not ensure that the jury weighed the aggravating circumstances and the mitigating circumstances in a manner consistent with § 13A-5-46, as recently interpreted in Bryant. Bryant, however, is distinguishable.
In that case, the Court explained:
___ So.2d at ___.
In Bryant, the jury was instructed, in pertinent part:
___ So.2d at ___.
To this point, the charge in Bryant is similar to the one given in this case. Neither charge instructed the jury as to what sentence to recommend if it found that the mitigating circumstances and the aggravating circumstances were equally balanced. However, the court in Bryant further charged the jury:
Id. at ___.
This Court held that the trial court's instructions, taken as a whole, constituted plain error, explaining:
Id. at ___.
The charge in this case was not infected with the peculiar error present in Bryant, that is, the jury in this case was not invited to recommend a sentence of death without finding any aggravating circumstance. It was that invitation in Bryant that caused the error in that case to rise to the level of plain error, rather than error reversible only by a proper objection. Thus, in this case, although the court did not specifically instruct the jury what to do if it found the mitigating and aggravating circumstances equally balanced, we cannot conclude, considering the charge in its entirety, that the error "seriously affect[ed] the fairness, integrity or public reputation of [these] judicial proceedings," Ex parte Davis, 718 So. 2d  at 1173-74, so as to require a reversal of the sentence.
At the end of the guilt phase of the trial, the jury found McNabb guilty of murder made capital because the victim (1) was an on-duty police officer, § 13A-5-40(a)(5), Ala.Code 1975, and (2) was slain with a deadly weapon while the victim was occupying a vehicle, § 13A-5-40(a)(17). At the end of the sentencing phase, the trial court further found the existence of three aggravating circumstances set forth in Ala.Code 1975, § 13A-5-49, namely, (1) that "[t]he defendant knowingly created a great risk of death to many persons," § 13A-5-49(3); (2) that "[t]he capital offense was committed for the purpose of avoiding or preventing a lawful arrest," § 13A-5-49(5); and (3) that "[t]he capital offense was committed to disrupt or hinder the lawful exercise of any governmental function or the enforcement of laws," § 13A-5-49(7).
In Ring v. Arizona, 536 U.S.  at 609, 122 S. Ct. 2428, the Court held that the Sixth Amendment does not permit a "sentencing judge, sitting without a jury, to find an aggravating circumstance necessary for the imposition of the death penalty." *1005 McNabb contends  correctly  that, despite his conviction for capital murder, he could not have been sentenced to death unless at least one of the aggravating circumstances set forth in § 13A-5-49 was found by the jury to exist beyond a reasonable doubt. See Ala.Code 1975, §§ 13A-5-45(f) and 13A-5-45(e).[1] McNabb concedes that the jury was instructed to make a unanimous finding as to whether any of the three aggravating circumstances ultimately found to exist by the trial judge existed. He insists, however, that the trial court committed plain error in failing to instruct the jury expressly that it must unanimously find the existence of the same aggravating circumstance. This failure, he contends, created the danger that less than all of the jurors found the existence of any one aggravating circumstance. If that occurred, he argues, then his death sentence is based on factors never found by the jury, and violates the rule set forth in Ring.[2] We find no merit in this argument. The instructions contained a number of premises that, when considered as a whole, apprised the jury of the proper unanimity requirement.
First, the jury was charged that it could not consider a recommendation of death unless it first found the existence of at least one of the statutory aggravating circumstances. Specifically, the trial court stated: "[B]efore you can even consider recommending that the defendant's punishment should be death, each and every one of you must be convinced beyond a reasonable doubt based on the evidence that at least one ... of the [three statutory] aggravating circumstances exist." (Emphasis added.)
Second, the court explained that one finding could be made by jurors, individually, while another could be made only by the jury as a unit. Specifically, the court stated:
(Emphasis added.) The distinction between "the jury" and "jurors" was more clearly expressed in the "supplemental" instruction given at the end of the penalty phase, which contrasted the jury's duty as to the weight to be accorded the mitigating circumstances. The court explained, in pertinent part:
(Emphasis added.) This portion of the charge clearly put the jury on notice that unanimity was not required for a finding that mitigating circumstances existed, but was required for a finding that aggravating circumstances existed. In other words, the jury was informed that it must  as a unit  unanimously find the existence of any aggravating circumstance it considered in arriving at a recommended sentence.
The jury's unanimous finding of one aggravating circumstance is sufficient to satisfy Ring. Ex parte Waldrop, 859 So. 2d 1181, 1188 (Ala.2002) ("Only one aggravating circumstance must exist in order to impose a sentence of death."). Consequently, the court's instruction as to the unanimity required for a finding of aggravating circumstances does not constitute plain error.
McNabb contends that the court committed plain error in giving a portion of its jury charge at the beginning of the sentencing phase. He relies on Ala.Code 1975, § 13A-5-46(d), which provides: "After hearing the evidence and the arguments of both parties at the sentence hearing, the jury shall be instructed on its function and on the relevant law by the trial judge. The jury shall then retire to deliberate concerning the advisory verdict it is to return." However, the statute does not prohibit a bifurcation, that is, the giving of a charge both before and after the presentation of evidence and closing arguments.
Moreover, Ala. R.Crim. P. 21.1, as amended effective March 1, 2001, provides, in part:
(Emphasis added.) It does not compromise the "integrity or public reputation of judicial proceedings" to charge the jury at the beginning of the sentencing phase, where the timing is now expressly authorized by a rule promulgated by this Court. Consequently, the trial court did not commit plain error in bifurcating its instructions during the sentencing phase of McNabb's trial.
In summary, we find no plain error in the sentencing phase of McNabb's trial. Consequently, the judgment of the Court of Criminal Appeals is affirmed.
AFFIRMED.
HOUSTON, SEE, LYONS, BROWN, JOHNSTONE, and STUART, JJ., concur.
HARWOOD, J., concurs specially.
HARWOOD, Justice (concurring specially).
I concur in the main opinion. I write specially only to state an analysis supplemental, but in no way contradictory, to that set out in the part of the main opinion captioned "I. Weighing the Aggravating and Mitigating Circumstances."
*1007 I agree with the conclusion that the "weighing" instruction in this case is distinguishable from the instruction involved in Ex parte Bryant, [Ms. 1990901, June 21, 2002] ___ So.2d ___ (Ala.2002). In Bryant the jury was never instructed that if the aggravating circumstance or circumstances did not outweigh the mitigating circumstance or circumstances, the only punishment the jury could recommend would be life imprisonment without the possibility of parole. Although the judge told the jury preliminarily that "later on" he would explain to the jury that its "consideration" would be whether the aggravating circumstances outweighed the mitigating circumstances, and that the jury's options for recommended punishment would depend on whether the aggravating circumstance or circumstances outweighed the mitigating circumstance or circumstances, the judge failed to do so. Rather, when the time came for the explanations, the judge three times phrased the explanations only in terms of whether the mitigating circumstances outweighed the aggravating circumstances and stated, in effect, that even if the jury found no aggravating circumstance to exist, the jury could still recommend the death penalty.
In contrast, the judge in McNabb's case charged the jury that it would have to find at least one aggravating circumstance to have been proven beyond a reasonable doubt and be "convinced that the aggravating circumstance outweighs the mitigating circumstances," before it could recommend death as the punishment. Conversely, the jury was instructed that if it found "that the mitigating circumstances outweigh any aggravating circumstance or circumstances," it would have to recommend the punishment of life imprisonment without parole. I read the trial judge's instructions, as set out in the main opinion, and under a "plain error" standard of review, to have informed the jury as follows:
1. Only if the aggravating circumstance or circumstances outweighed all the mitigating circumstances could the recommended punishment be death;
2. If the mitigating circumstances outweighed the aggravating circumstance or circumstances, then the recommended punishment would have to be life imprisonment without parole; and
3. If the aggravating circumstance or circumstances and the mitigating circumstances were of equal weight, in which case clearly the aggravating circumstance or circumstances could not be said to outweigh the mitigating circumstances, the recommended punishment likewise would have to be life imprisonment without parole.
It is certainly the better practice for the trial judge to explain explicitly to the jury that if it finds the aggravating circumstances and the mitigating circumstances to be of equal weight and therefore balanced with neither one outweighing the other, then the recommended punishment must be life imprisonment without parole. If a trial judge failed to do so after a properly grounded objection by the defendant, our analysis of the situation would have to take that fact into account. Under the scope of a plain-error standard of review, however, it cannot be said that the instruction given McNabb's jury did not adequately delimit the punishment to be recommended for each of the three possible weighing outcomes.
[1]  The Court of Criminal Appeals correctly concluded that none of the three aggravating circumstances found by the trial judge were encompassed within the jury's guilt-phase verdict. McNabb v. State, [Ms. CR 98-0967, April 25, 2003] 887 So. 2d 929, 939 (Ala.Crim.App.2001)(opinion on application for rehearing on return to remand).
[2]  McNabb concedes that each juror must have found the existence of at least one of the three aggravating circumstances, but he contends that it is unclear whether all jurors ultimately agreed on the existence of the same aggravating circumstance.