Opinion ID: 1179411
Heading Depth: 1
Heading Rank: 4

Heading: Interim Solution by District Judges

Text: Since this Court has not seen fit to bring the Idaho sentencing process into a constitutional posture, and since the current session of the Idaho Legislature has not even formally taken up the effect of Adamson, we are undoubtably going to be faced with a year or more of uncertainty while we await the review of Adamson by the United States Supreme Court on Certiorari. Should the 9th Circuit be affirmed, then all death sentence cases in Idaho which have been imposed in that interim period will have to be reversed and remanded for resentencing, if not a total new trial. I believe there is a method whereby our Idaho district judges, exercising their intelligence and their plenary power, can bring order to this chaos and validly complete capital cases. It has always been the law of Idaho that district judges have the power to call for advisory juries in cases where juries are not mandated by statute or common law. Our district judges could, on their own motion, adopt the procedures of the thirty-one other states by bifurcating the trial and bringing the jury in as an advisory jury at the sentencing phase. So that the jury would be fully apprised of the seriousness of its undertaking, the district judge would inform the jury that he would not impose the death penalty unless they so recommended. The district judge would, of course, retain his traditional power under Idaho law to impose a sentence less than death if he deemed such reduction appropriate. By engaging in this procedure, a district judge would not only be doing a service to the taxpayers by way of judicial economy in obviating the need for retrials or resentencing, but additionally the court would be properly serving both society and the defendant by protecting the constitutional right to trial by jury.