Opinion ID: 1147525
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 2

Heading: Penalty Determination Instruction

Text: The court instructed the jury how to make its penalty determination in the following terms: It is now your duty to determine which of the two penalties, death or confinement in the state prison for life without possibility of parole, shall be imposed on the defendant. After having heard all the evidence and having heard and considered the arguments of counsel, you shall consider, take into account, and be guided by the applicable factors of aggravating and mitigating circumstances upon which you have been instructed. If you agree unanimously and beyond a reasonable doubt[ [19] ] that the aggravating circumstances outweigh the mitigating circumstances, you shall impose a sentence of death; however, if you are not satisfied beyond a reasonable doubt that the aggravating circumstances outweigh the mitigating circumstances, you shall impose a sentence of confinement in the state prison for life without the possibility of parole. (23) This court has determined that an instruction using the statutory language of section 190.3, [20] such as the instruction given in this case, is potentially confusing and could mislead the jury as to the manner in which penalty should be determined. ( People v. Brown (1985) 40 Cal.3d 512, 544, fn. 17 [220 Cal. Rptr. 637, 709 P.2d 440], revd. on other grounds sub nom. California v. Brown (1987) 479 U.S. 538 [93 L.Ed.2d 934, 107 S.Ct. 837].) One danger is that the jury might believe it could perform the weighing process in a mechanical fashion by comparing the number of factors in aggravation with the number in mitigation, or by the arbitrary assignment of weights to the factors. (See People v. Allen (1986) 42 Cal.3d 1222, 1277 [232 Cal. Rptr. 849, 729 P.2d 115].) The other danger is that the jury might fail to understand that our statutory scheme does not require any juror to vote for the death penalty unless, as a result of the weighing process, the juror personally determines that death is the appropriate penalty under all the circumstances. ( Ibid.; People v. Brown, supra, at p. 541.) To determine whether the jury may have been misled to defendant's prejudice, we examine the whole record and in particular the arguments of counsel. ( People v. Hendricks (1988) 44 Cal.3d 635, 650-651 [244 Cal. Rptr. 181, 749 P.2d 836]; People v. Brown, supra, at p. 544, fn. 17.) (24) In argument to the jury the prosecutor compared the process of penalty determination to placing weights on a scale, but he cautioned the jury that it was unlike the system in the laboratory because the aggravating and mitigating circumstances did not each have the same weight and repeatedly told the jury the determination of what weight to assign to each circumstance was to be made by each juror individually: You decide which factors have more weight and which have less weight. [21] Thus the jury was not given a mistaken impression of the weighing process as a matter of counting or of assigning weights arbitrarily to the relevant aggravating and mitigating circumstances. Although the prosecutor repeatedly urged the jury to follow the law if it determined that aggravating circumstances outweighed mitigating circumstances, those repeated urgings were offset by the repeated statements, already mentioned, regarding the jurors' discretionary control over the weighing process. As this court has previously observed, when jurors are told they can determine individually the weight to be assigned to the aggravating and mitigating circumstances, and can decide that one circumstance outweighs all others, they necessarily understand they have discretion to select the appropriate penalty. ( People v. Burton (1989) 48 Cal.3d 843, 873 [258 Cal. Rptr. 184, 771 P.2d 1270].) Also, the prosecutor on one occasion described the jury's penalty function expressly in terms of determining the appropriate penalty, stating: The system is designed in such a way that it is felt better for 12 members of the community, who reflect the values of the community, to decide what is an appropriate punishment in this most serious of cases. In addition, the jurors were expressly instructed they could consider sympathy for defendant in determining penalty. Having been thus properly informed that the weighing process involved individual discretion and was intended to result in a determination of the appropriate penalty, and that sympathy for defendant could play a role in this determination, the jurors could not have been misled by the prosecutor's repeated references to the mandatory character of the jurors' duty to impose the death penalty if the aggravating circumstances outweighed the mitigating. Nor could the prosecutor's remarks, viewed as a whole, have led the jurors to believe that the responsibility for determining the appropriateness of the death penalty rested on someone or something besides themselves. (See Caldwell v. Mississippi (1985) 472 U.S. 320, 328-329 [86 L.Ed.2d 231, 238-240, 105 S.Ct. 2633].) Having reviewed the entire record, we conclude the jury was not misled to defendant's prejudice regarding the penalty determination process.