Opinion ID: 1960299
Heading Depth: 1
Heading Rank: 13

Heading: comparison of marko bey's case to similar cases

Text: In the salient-factors approach, the AOC grouped Bey's case with other cases in which the defendants had a prior murder conviction. Twenty-one cases involving thirteen different defendants exhibited a separate murder conviction that was or could have been offered as a prior murder conviction. Excluding Bey, eight of those cases resulted in a death sentence, and the remaining twelve resulted in life sentences. Our task is to determine whether, by comparison to jury sentences of defendants in comparable cases, Bey's sentencing jury acted aberrantly by sentencing him to death. A defendant's sentence is not disproportionate simply because other defendants who have committed similar crimes have not received sentences other than death. No two murders are identical. The comparable cases, although similar in many respects, involve different defendants, different facts, different legal issues, and different juries. We therefore anticipate some inconsistency between the results of the comparable cases and the case before us. Of necessity, the persuasiveness of the comparison of Bey's case to others will depend on the similarity of the facts presented to the sentencing jury in those cases. We glean those facts from the published opinions or, if the opinions are unpublished, from the AOC's Detailed Narrative Summaries. We conclude that juries in comparable cases generally sentence defendants like Bey to death and that Bey's jury did not act aberrantly by sentencing him to death.