Opinion ID: 852566
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 5

Heading: Was There Individualized Sentencing?

Text: Kubsch cites the Court's declaration that an individualized decision is essential in capital cases. Woodson v. North Carolina, 428 U.S. 280, 304, 96 S.Ct. 2978, 49 L.Ed.2d 944 (1976). He contends that the absence of mitigating evidence before the jury in his case meant that there was no such individualized sentence. This state of the evidence, of course, is the direct result of the strategy Wayne Kubsch insisted on following  a strategy he discussed with his lawyers, articulated in open court, and discussed directly with the jury. Kubsch further contends that the trial judge erred by following the jury's recommendation, rather than ordering a new pre-sentence report and determining for himself, apart from the jury's recommendation, whether the evidence and the aggravators and mitigating factors warranted death or life without parole. This Court's assessment of the role of jury and judge after the General Assembly's 2002 amendments to the statute on death and life without parole is a work in progress. Still, two principles have been articulated that seem adequate to address the present case. In one of several cases handed down together, we observed that there is only one sentencing determination, which is made by the jury. Stroud v. State, 809 N.E.2d 274, 287 (Ind.2004). In another case, Justice Boehm said that the amendments were not intended to overturn traditional checks on jury error or jury discretion, or to eliminate the trial judge's function under Trial Rule 59. Helsley v. State, 809 N.E.2d 292, 306 (Ind. 2004) (Boehm, J., concurring). Whatever else may be said about the sentencing process in this case, fashioned as it was by Kubsch himself (who declined the judge's invitation even to make a statement before the court pronounced sentence), what we do know about the aggravating circumstances and the mitigating circumstances that counsel would have attempted to prove had Kubsch not prevented it presents no basis for setting aside the jury's recommendation and the trial court's sentence based upon it. The aggravators were the fact of a triple murder and the fact that one of the victims was under the age of twelve. These are two rather substantial factors. The mitigating evidence Kubsch's lawyers would have tried to present was that Kubsch was usually a caring person, a good worker, someone who would live an orderly prison life, and that his triple killing was an aberration to his personality. (Appellant's App. at 348-53.) All in all, even had this evidence been placed before the trial judge, it does not appear to rise to the level necessary under, say, Trial Rule 59 for setting aside a jury verdict.