Opinion ID: 2639482
Heading Depth: 3
Heading Rank: 2

Heading: Narrowing the class of death-eligible defendants

Text: Defendant argues that section 190.3 does not sufficiently narrow the class of murderers eligible for the death penalty. (See Zant v. Stephens (1983) 462 U.S. 862, 877-878, 103 S.Ct. 2733, 77 L.Ed.2d 235; People v. Bacigalupo, supra, 6 Cal.4th at pp. 465-466, 24 Cal.Rptr.2d 808, 862 P.2d 808.) As in People v. Wader (1993) 5 Cal.4th 610, 669, 20 Cal.Rptr.2d 788, 854 P.2d 80, defendant has not demonstrated on this record, or through sources of which we might take judicial notice, that his claims are empirically accurate, or that, if they were correct, this would require the invalidation of the death penalty law. The statistics defendant cites are drawn solely from published decisions of this court and the Court of Appeal, reviewing cases in which a defendant was found guilty. As defendant recognizes, this is obviously a skewed sample. It omits all unpublished decisions, and all cases in which the defendant did not appeal, groups likely to include a higher proportion of cases without special circumstances. Thus defendant's figures fail to show the extent to which the California statute narrows the proportion of death-eligible murderers.