Opinion ID: 1199801
Heading Depth: 3
Heading Rank: 5

Heading: Instruction to Weigh the Totality of the Aggravating and Mitigating Circumstances

Text: As noted (see pt. IV.D., ante ), the court instructed the jury that in determining penalty, you shall consider, take into account and be guided by the applicable factors of aggravating and mitigating circumstances upon which you have been instructed. [¶] The weighing of aggravating and mitigating circumstances does not mean a mere mechanical counting of factors on each side of an imaginary scale, or the arbitrary assignment of weights to any of them. You are free to assign whatever moral or sympathetic value you deem appropriate to each and all of the various factors you are permitted to consider. In weighing the various circumstances you simply determine under the relevant evidence which penalty is justified and appropriate by considering the totality of the aggravating circumstances with the totality of the mitigating circumstances. To return a judgment of death, each of you must be persuaded that the aggravating evidence is so substantial in comparison with the mitigating circumstances that it warrants death instead of life without parole. (Italics added.) Defendant had requested an instruction to such effect. (29) Defendant now contends that, by instructing the jury as it did, the court erred. Defendant's argument appears to be this: with its language referring to the totality of the aggravating and mitigating circumstances, the instruction in question erroneously implied that a single mitigating circumstance could not outweigh any and all aggravating circumstances and hence could not support a decision that death was not the appropriate punishment. An instruction containing an implication of this sort would indeed have been erroneous. In People v. Grant (1988) 45 Cal.3d 829, 857, footnote 5 [248 Cal. Rptr. 444, 755 P.2d 894], we characterized as proper an instruction that stated, inter alia, that `[o]ne mitigating circumstance may be sufficient to support a decision that death is not appropriate punishment in this case.' An instruction to the contrary would obviously be improper. The instruction here, however, was not such. In fact, a reasonable juror would have understood and employed its words to embrace the substance of what was found proper in Grant. Certainly, such a juror would not have interpreted or used its language referring to the totality of the aggravating and mitigating circumstances in a death oriented fashion to relate[] solely to the quantity ... of the factors and not to their quality, or to entail `a mere mechanical counting of factors on each side of the imaginary scale....' (Underscoring in original.) There is no reasonable likelihood that the jury misconstrued or misapplied the challenged instruction in violation of the Eighth or Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution or any other legal provision or principle. True, an instruction like that in Grant would have been proper. But it was simply not required.