Opinion ID: 762565
Heading Depth: 4
Heading Rank: 2

Heading: Guilty Verdict

Text: 67 The petitioner contends throughout his briefs on appeal that the jury's verdict of aggravated murder is logically inconsistent with its not-guilty verdicts on two death specifications. That is, the jury convicted Mapes of aggravated murder, one element of which is the specific intent to kill, but acquitted him of two death-penalty specifications, one alleging that the murder took place during an aggravated robbery, and the other that the death occurred during an aggravated burglary. Under Ohio law aggravated burglary is defined as: 68 (A) No person, by force, stealth, or deception, shall trespass in an occupied structure, ... with purpose to commit therein any theft offense, ... or any felony, when any of the following apply: 69 . . . . . 70 (2) The offender has a deadly weapon ... on or about his person or under his control[.] 71 Ohio Rev.Code Ann. § 2911.11. Aggravated robbery is a robbery, that is, committing a theft offense, if the person has a deadly weapon ... on or about his person or under his control. 72 Mapes further maintains that being acquitted on a principal-offender specification means that the jury found he was not the triggerman in the Chap's shooting, and that being acquitted of the other specification means he did not have the specific intent to kill. Mapes further maintains that the verdicts are findings of constitutional fact, and thus the state courts' recitation of the facts, implying or stating that Mapes was the triggerman and did have the specific intent to kill Allen, is erroneous. 73 In other words, if Mapes neither shot Allen nor was complicit in a plan to shoot him, then he lacked, as a matter of constitutional law, the requisite culpability necessary under the Eighth Amendment to justify the death penalty. Additionally, Mapes would have lacked the requisite intent under the Ohio aggravated-murder statute which unambiguously requires, in a felony-murder situation, that a defendant who participated in the felony also have intended to cause the death of another. Therefore, his argument continues, if the state-court judgment is allowed to stand, he will have been convicted of aggravated murder although the jury found one of the essential elements lacking. According to Mapes, this violates his right to due process: his procedural right to know in advance the elements of a crime he is charged with, and his substantive right to fundamental fairness. 74 United States v. Powell, 469 U.S. 57, 105 S.Ct. 471, 83 L.Ed.2d 461 (1984), requires us to reject Mapes's contentions. In Powell, the defendant's phone had been legally tapped, and she was recorded helping her son and husband distribute narcotics and collect money for drugs sold. When she was arrested, she had two kilograms of cocaine and 2700 methaqualone tablets, among other things, in her car. See id. at 59, 105 S.Ct. 471. A jury convicted her of using the telephone in conspiring to possess with intent to distribute cocaine. However, the same jury acquitted her of conspiring to possess with intent to distribute cocaine. See id. at 59-60, 105 S.Ct. 471. The defendant appealed from the convictions, claiming that the acquitted count constituted an element of the telephone-facilitation count of which she was convicted, and that therefore the verdicts were inconsistent. The Ninth Circuit agreed, finding that the acquittal on the predicate felony demonstrated that insufficient evidence existed as to the telephone-facilitation charge. Id. at 61, 105 S.Ct. 471. 75 The Supreme Court rejected this analysis, reasoning that  '[t]he most that can be said [about an inconsistent verdict] is that the verdict shows that either in the acquittal or the conviction the jury did not speak their [sic] real conclusions, but that does not show that they were not convinced of the defendant's guilt.'  Id. at 64-65, 105 S.Ct. 471 (citation omitted). Significantly, the Court repudiated the argument that the portion of an inconsistent verdict favorable to the defendant must be accepted and the portion favorable to the government discarded. See id. at 65, 105 S.Ct. 471. To the contrary, it is possible that the jury, convinced of guilt, properly reached its conclusion on the compound offense, and then through mistake, compromise, or lenity, arrived at an inconsistent conclusion on the lesser offense. Id. Although  'error,' in the sense that the jury has not followed the court's instructions, most certainly has occurred, nothing in the Constitution requires that this error subject the jury's collective judgment to review and reversal. Id. at 65-66, 105 S.Ct. 471. 76 [O]nce the jury has heard the evidence and the case has been submitted, the litigants must accept the jury's collective judgment. Courts have always resisted inquiring into a jury's thought processes ...; through this deference the jury brings to the criminal process, in addition to the collective judgment of the community, an element of needed finality. 77 Id. at 67, 105 S.Ct. 471 (citations omitted). 78 Even if Mapes's convictions on the aggravated-murder charges and the acquittals on the specifications are truly inconsistent--a conclusion that does not necessarily follow--this does not mean that Mapes lacked the specific intent to kill Allen. All the verdicts demonstrate is that the jury found Mapes guilty of aggravated murder, including the element that he possessed the intent to kill, and that it found him not guilty of two specifications which would have supported the death penalty under Ohio law. The aggravated-murder conviction does not require guilty verdicts on the specifications, and therefore cannot be set aside. Similarly, the state could not have sought the death penalty under Ohio law based only on the finding implicit in the aggravated-murder conviction that Mapes intended to kill Allen. Powell teaches that the inconsistent verdicts are viewed completely separately, and that no conclusion may be drawn from comparing the two. Ohio is within constitutional limits in finding Mapes guilty of aggravated murder and in imposing the death penalty because the jury found he had the requisite intent on the substantive charge.