Opinion ID: 2607400
Heading Depth: 1
Heading Rank: 5

Heading: single or separate verdicts for entry of the jury determination of guilt for the differentiated character of first degree murder, premeditated killing or felony murder

Text: For this appeal, the patchwork verdict and not the special unanimous decision instruction is presented. However, the issues are essentially the same. [10] This is the most complex and difficult aspect of the trilogy issues in this case. We are here presented the unitary verdict unanimous instruction decidendi which has created unlimited litigative review with frequently differentiated results and inconclusive justifications used to affirm possible non-unanimous jury decisions. See Schad, 111 S.Ct. 2491, compared with People v. Lowe, 660 P.2d 1261 (Colo.1983) and State v. Alford, 329 N.C. 755, 407 S.E.2d 519 (1991), followed by People v. O'Neill, 803 P.2d 164 (Colo.1990); People v. Freeman, 668 P.2d 1371 (Colo.1983); State v. Boots, 308 Or. 371, 780 P.2d 725 (1989); and, in particular, Mullaney v. Wilbur, 421 U.S. 684, 95 S.Ct. 1881, 44 L.Ed.2d 508 (1975) and In re Winship, 397 U.S. 358, 90 S.Ct. 1068, 25 L.Ed.2d 368 (1970). [11] The issue is not new in recent date to Wyoming since first presented in dictum in Cloman, 574 P.2d 410 and more recently applied in Price, 807 P.2d 909. In Cloman, the defendant and co-participant brutally murdered three good samaritan benefactors, robbed the bodies and took the vehicle to Chicago where the malefactors were apprehended. Neither premeditated homicide nor felony murder involvement was realistically in question. In what originally was a death penalty case, that result was only altered by the unconstitutionality of the Wyoming statute. Kennedy v. State, 559 P.2d 1014 (Wyo.1977); Gregg v. Georgia, 428 U.S. 153, 96 S.Ct. 2909, 49 L.Ed.2d 859 (1976); Furman v. Georgia, 408 U.S. 238, 92 S.Ct. 2726, 33 L.Ed.2d 346 (1972). The sum and substance of the Cloman opinion was the evidentiary finding for the jury decision that the multiple homicides occurred in the perpetration of robbery and were premeditated and willful malice killings. A disjunctive unitary verdict had been used and this court applied the fact-finding substitutional evidence rule to affirm. Unfortunately, the opinion hypothesized an unknown about what the jury could have found, not what the evidence would have sustained. The substantiated evidence rule to be hereafter discussed in detail for the court justified a possible non-unanimous jury decision and a composite verdict result. Cloman was not remarkable in evidentiary clarity of murder theory where including both felony murder and premeditated murder. Overtly, problems would have been avoided for adjudication in Cloman if a standard had been established for usage of the bilateral verdict for premeditated and felony murder so the appellate court does not become required to act as the conceptional fact finder. Cloman also created the alternative problem of temporal relationship irrelevancy, again as unnecessary dictum. The Cloman unitary verdict dialectic use was then followed in Price where the real conflict presented was participation of the defendant in a felony to justify the felony murder component of the first degree murder conviction. Price, 807 P.2d 909, Urbigkit, C.J., dissenting. The historical Wyoming standard for unanimity started in early case law and was expressly stated by quotation from an even earlier Missouri case: The defendant was entitled to a unanimous verdict of the jury upon the issues of his guilt or innocence of the particular offense for which he was on trial. Under this instruction and the general verdict returned, some of the jurors may have believed the testimony in support of the charge as to one of the gaming devices and disbelieved the testimony as to the other, while the remaining members of the jury may have found and believed conversely. State v. Tobin, 31 Wyo. 355, 371, 226 P. 681, 686 (1924) (quoting State v. Washington, 242 Mo. 401, 409, 146 S.W. 1164, 1166 (1912)). It might be conceded now that justice has been permanently truncated by non-unanimous verdict adaptation in constitutional law in Wyoming, except the United States Supreme Court has been called to more recently examine the subject in Schad, 111 S.Ct. 2491, where that court decided, on a four plurality, one concurrence and a four dissent vote, whether the identical unitary verdict issue produced a constitutional misappropriation in process. Conversely, the national legal trend in all state courts is clearly in the opposite direction where now aimed to recapture unanimity as a function of jury decisions and undoubtedly to avoid unnecessary appeals and divisive doubt as to what the jury really determined. Schad came to the United States Supreme Court from the death penalty affirmation of the Arizona Supreme Court in State v. Schad, 163 Ariz. 411, 788 P.2d 1162 (1989), cert. granted, ___ U.S. ___, 111 S.Ct. 243, 112 L.Ed.2d 202 (1990). See also State v. Schad, 129 Ariz. 557, 633 P.2d 366 (1981), cert. denied, 455 U.S. 983, 102 S.Ct. 1492, 71 L.Ed.2d 693 (1982) and State v. Schad, 142 Ariz. 619, 691 P.2d 710 (1984). Schad addressed a hitchhiker killing of his automobile ride host. In Schad, the Arizona court gave quick consideration to the unitary verdict issue in comment, including citations, of the Arizona cases of State v. Encinas, 132 Ariz. 493, 647 P.2d 624 (1982) and State v. Axley, 132 Ariz. 383, 646 P.2d 268 (1982), and then quoted from Encinas: In State v. Encinas, 132 Ariz. 493, 647 P.2d 624 (1982), we stated: In Arizona, first degree murder is only one crime regardless whether it occurs as a premeditated murder or a felony murder. See State v. Axley, 132 Ariz. 383, 646 P.2d 268 (1982). Although a defendant is entitled to a unanimous jury verdict on whether the criminal act charged has been committed, State v. Counterman, 8 Ariz.App. 526, 448 P.2d 96 (1968), the defendant is not entitled to a unanimous verdict on the precise manner in which the act was committed. Id. at 496, 647 P.2d at 627. Our decision in State v. Smith, 160 Ariz. 507, 774 P.2d 811 (1989), did not change the substantive rule that it was not error to have one form of verdict for first degree murder even though both premeditation and felony murder were being submitted to the jury. Smith does, however, strongly urge that alternate forms of verdict be submitted to a jury when a case is submitted on alternative theories of premeditated and felony murder. Id. at 507, 774 P.2d at 811. Schad, 788 P.2d at 1168. It is difficult to relate the litigative history of the unitary verdict for differentiated offense first degree murder in Arizona to the treatment by the United States Supreme Court plurality decision following further appeal. In first component, the special concurrence of Justice Scalia is simplistic and exact. Unfortunately, it tends to put in issue an entire universe of differentiated offense unitary verdict cases which are not felony murder/premeditated murder/first degree murder in nature. See, for example, the basic case on the subject, United States v. Gipson, 553 F.2d 453 (5th Cir.1977), which also was conceptualized by the plurality in statement: We are not persuaded that the Gipson approach really answers the question, however. Although the classification of alternatives into distinct conceptual groupings is a way to express a judgment about the limits of permissible alternatives, the notion is too indeterminate to provide concrete guidance to courts faced with verdict specificity questions. Schad, 111 S.Ct. at 2498. [12] The special concurrence of Justice Scalia defined a historical justification for the unitary verdict for the differentiated offenses of these specific crimes, felony murder and premeditated murder. He finds only the single offense in first degree murder which may alternatively be committed by the entirely different activities of felony murder or premeditated killing. To differentiate the permissible treatment of first degree murder as a single offense, whether or not reached by entirely different offense activities from umbrella offenses, he examined historical justification to extract provided due process. Justice Scalia does not address requirements for unanimity, except in rejection of the requirement, he says: As the plurality observes, it has long been the general rule that when a single crime can be committed in various ways, jurors need not agree upon the mode of commission.    That rule is not only constitutional, it is probably indispensable in a system that requires a unanimous jury verdict to convict. Id. at 2506. This becomes the epitome of pragmatic constitutionalism. For Schad and to define federal constitutional bases as the decisive route for history to create due process, Justice Scalia said: It is precisely the historical practices that define what is due. Fundamental fairness analysis may appropriately be applied to departures from traditional American conceptions of due process; but when judges test their individual notions of fairness against an American tradition that is deep and broad and continuing, it is not the tradition that is on trial, but the judges. And that is the case here. Submitting killing in the course of a robbery and premeditated killing to the jury under a single charge is not some novel composite that can be subjected to the indignity of fundamental fairness review. It was the norm when this country was founded, was the norm when the Fourteenth Amendment was adopted in 1868, and remains the norm today. Unless we are here to invent a Constitution rather than enforce one, it is impossible that a practice as old as the common law and still in existence in the vast majority of States does not provide that process which is due. If I did not believe that, I might well be with the dissenters in this case. Id. at 2507 (emphasis in original). His further discussion is informative: Certainly the plurality provides no satisfactory explanation of why (apart from the endorsement of history) it is permissible to combine in one count killing in the course of robbery and killing by premeditation. The only point it makes is that the depravity of mind required for the two may be considered morally equivalent.    But the petitioner here does not complain about lack of moral equivalence: he complains that, as far as we know, only six jurors believed he was participating in a robbery, and only six believed he intended to kill. Perhaps moral equivalence is a necessary condition for allowing such a verdict to stand, but surely the plurality does not pretend that it is sufficient. (We would not permit, for example, an indictment charging that the defendant assaulted either X on Tuesday or Y on Wednesday, despite the moral equivalence of those two acts.) Thus, the plurality approves the Arizona practice in the present case because it meets one of the conditions for constitutional validity. It does not say what the other conditions are, or why the Arizona practice meets them. With respect, I do not think this delivers the critical examination,    which the plurality promises as a substitute for reliance upon historical practice. In fact, I think its analysis ultimately relies upon nothing but historical practice (whence does it derive even the moral equivalence requirement?)but to acknowledge that reality would be to acknowledge a rational limitation upon our power, which bobtailed critical examination obviously is not. Th[e] requirement of [due process] is met if the trial is had according to the settled course of judicial proceedings. Due process of law is process due according to the law of the land. [13] Id. at 2507 (emphasis in original and quoting Walker v. Sauvinet, 2 Otto 90, 92 U.S. 90, 93, 23 L.Ed. 678 (1875)). Any analysis of Schad fails to make much sense unless first attention to the Justice Scalia position understands his recognition of the obvious. We deal with two totally different societal offenses necessarily having in common only a resulting homicide. Due process is the concern which he finds to be served in the unitary verdictnon-unanimous status by historical justification of continued use. Strangely enough for Wyoming, that historical perspective is a total void in adjudicated case law from date of statehood until 1978 when Cloman was authored by this court. To address then the plurality decision in Schad, it is found that after first disregarding Gipson and its whole universe of federal and state determinations, the author states: We do not, of course, suggest that jury instructions requiring increased verdict specificity are not desirable, and in fact the Supreme Court of Arizona has itself recognized that separate verdict forms are useful in cases submitted to a jury on alternative theories of premeditated and felony murder. State v. Smith, 160 Ariz. 507, 513, 774 P.2d 811, 817 (1989). We hold only that the Constitution did not command such a practice on the facts of this case. Schad, 111 S.Ct. at 2504. Having said what is right but not required, the plurality directs itself to the conceptualization similar to the inquiry about the number of angels dancing on the head of a pin by addressing moral equivalency: Whether or not everyone would agree that the mental state that precipitates death in the course of robbery is the moral equivalent of premeditation, it is clear that such equivalence could reasonably be found, which is enough to rule out the argument that this moral disparity bars treating them as alternative means to satisfy the mental element of a single offense. Id. at 2503-04. The problem with the concept of moral equivalency is that it ignores the requirement for the jury to unanimously find guilt within conduct constituting a criminal offense and leaves an ad hoc rule to be immediately applied. Obviously, courts and prosecutors have declined to adopt the useful approach involved in a jury unanimity finding provided by separate verdict forms for these two factually differentiated characters of criminal conduct. In the individual case, death may be the result of both ( Cloman ), or one ( Price ), or even on occasion neither, where the killing was done by someone else and a precipitative felony was not committed by the defendant. Conceptually, for the theory of defense for this defendant, the latter is what Bouwkamp argues and testified actually occurred. In his Schad opinion writing, Justice White, with the four Justice dissent, appropriately recognized that the decision of neither the plurality nor the special concurrence accommodated the due process mandates of In re Winship, 397 U.S. 358, 90 S.Ct. 1068, which provided a fundamental tenant for this nation's criminal law. In declining to hide the actuality in either historical practice or moral equivalency, Justice White stated: It is true that we generally give great deference to the States in defining the elements of crimes. I fail to see, however, how that truism advances the plurality's case. There is no failure to defer in recognizing the obvious: that premeditated murder and felony murder are alternative courses of conduct by which the crime of first-degree murder may be established. Schad, 111 S.Ct. at 2508. He appropriately recognized that the Arizona statute thus sets forth three general categories of conduct which constitute first degree murder (premeditated, during escape and felony murder). The Wyoming statute here at issue, Wyo.Stat. § 6-2-101, has only two componentspremeditated murder and felony murder. Within that concept, Justice White then established: Here, the prosecution set out to convict petitioner of first-degree murder by either of two different paths, premeditated murder and felony murder/robbery. Yet while these two paths both lead to a conviction for first-degree murder, they do so by divergent routes possessing no elements in common except the fact of a murder.          Unlike premeditated murder, felony murder does not require that the defendant commit the killing or even intend to kill, so long as the defendant is involved in the underlying felony. On the other hand, felony murderbut not premeditated murderrequires proof that the defendant had the requisite intent to commit and did commit the underlying felony. State v. McLoughlin, 139 Ariz. 481, 485, 679 P.2d 504, 508 (1984). Premeditated murder, however, demands an intent to kill as well as premeditation, neither of which is required to prove felony murder. Thus, contrary to the plurality's assertion,    the difference between the two paths is not merely one of a substitution of one mens rea for another. Rather, each contains separate elements of conduct and state of mind which cannot be mixed and matched at will. It is particularly fanciful to equate an intent to do no more than rob with a premeditated intent to murder. Consequently, a verdict that simply pronounces a defendant guilty of first-degree murder provides no clues as to whether the jury agrees that the three elements of premeditated murder or the two elements of felony murder have been proven beyond a reasonable doubt. Instead, it is entirely possible that half of the jury believed the defendant was guilty of premeditated murder and not guilty of felony murder/robbery, while half believed exactly the reverse. To put the matter another way, the plurality affirms this conviction without knowing that even a single element of either of the ways for proving first-degree murder, except the fact of a killing, has been found by a majority of the jury, let alone found unanimously by the jury as required by Arizona law. A defendant charged with first-degree murder is at least entitled to a verdictsomething petitioner did not get in this case as long as the possibility exists that no more than six jurors voted for any one element of first-degree murder, except the fact of a killing. Id. at 2508-09 (footnote omitted).