Opinion ID: 835638
Heading Depth: 1
Heading Rank: 9

Heading: challenges to the indictment

Text: At trial, defendant filed a Demurrer and Alternate Motion to Bar Capital Trial, arguing that the indictment was defective in that it failed to allege two elements of the crime of capital aggravated murder. Defendant asserted that capital aggravated murder constitutes a different crime from simple aggravated murder, the distinction being that the former crime involves additional elements not relevant to the latter crime, viz., that (1) defendant acted deliberately; and (2) with the reasonable expectation that the death of the deceased would result. Defendant then argued that, because, in the present case, the state had failed to allege those two statutory sentencing factors in the indictment, defendant never was charged with capital aggravated murder and neither the judge nor the jury could convict him of or sentence him for that crime. The trial court rejected that argument and denied the motion. We see no error in the trial court's decision. This court has rejected the idea that the crime defined in ORS 163.095  aggravated murdersomehow imports additional elements from ORS 163.150, the death penalty sentencing provision. See, e.g., State v. Wagner, 305 Or. 115, 171-72, 752 P.2d 1136 (1988), vac'd and rem'd on other grounds, 492 U.S. 914, 109 S.Ct. 3235, 106 L.Ed.2d 583 (1989) ( Wagner I ). Although defendant suggests that Wagner I conflicts with more recent federal and Oregon cases pertaining to the constitutional right to jury trial, we see no conflict. The cases that defendant cites suggest or hold that a jury must decide the deliberateness and reasonable expectation of death questions set out in ORS 163.150(1)(b)(A) because, depending on how they are answered, they may increase the punishment for the underlying offense. However, nothing in those cases suggests that those questions necessarily define a separate crime of capital aggravated murder and, as such, that they must be set out in the indictment. See State v. Sawatzky, 339 Or. 689, 698, 125 P.3d 722 (2005) (no authority exists for defendant's claim of a federal constitutional right to have aggravating or enhancing factors alleged in indictment). Defendant also mounts various global challenges to the constitutionality of Oregon's death penalty scheme in three separate assignments of error. The various constitutional issues that defendant raises in those three assignments of error all have been examined and rejected by this court in previous cases. Defendant acknowledges as much, but he argues that those cases were wrongly decided and that the constitutional issues should be decided anew. [22] However, nothing that defendant has offered persuades us that those earlier decisions were wrong. We conclude that the trial court did not err in denying defendant's motions and rejecting his demurrer.