Opinion ID: 1452825
Heading Depth: 1
Heading Rank: 2

Heading: the bifurcated trial ordered is error

Text: I dissent not only to the granting of a new trial in this collateral attack on the judgment and sentence, but to the kind of half trial ordered. The court, I think, is without constitutional power to limit the trial to the issue of penalty, for the power to prescribe procedure in criminal cases lies with the legislature which has established a comprehensive code of criminal procedure. If a new trial is to be granted, the case should be remanded for an entire new trial. After concluding in essence, as did Witherspoon, that in picking the jury which convicted the accused The State ... stacked the deck against the petitioner, the court cannot justifiably limit application of the stacked deck principle to the issue of punishment. It amounts to a declaration that, although a judgment of guilt may be entered on the verdict of a prejudiced jury in capital cases, an unprejudiced jury must be selected to decide the punishment. Neither the substance nor the broadest extension of Witherspoon and Boulden, I think, countenances such a holding. One cannot sensibly stretch the vague and tenuous rationale of those cases, in my opinion, to a point where they become effective authority upon which to oust the statutes of criminal procedure of the state of Washington or to decree a double trial in violation of them. A most minute sifting of the amorphous ideas conveyed in both Witherspoon and Boulden will yield little but the most nebulous propositions on which to base the drastic departure now taken from this state's code of criminal procedure governing capital trials. Whatever the two cases may be claimed to stand for, they are aimed essentially at avoiding the systematic exclusion of a class, kind or type of individual who is otherwise qualified to sit as a juror. If this is not the essence of their rationale, then the trial courts lose all discretion to try jury challenges and that function has been transferred to courts of review. Is the court now declaring that if the record shows a catechism on voir dire which meets with the reviewing court's expectations, then the juror is well seated; if the catechism does not meet the formalistic requirements of the court of review, then the juror should have been discharged. The Washington statute on jury selection places the discretion in the trial court; it is particularly designed to exclude jurors whose opposition to the death penalty would so affect their judgment as to the guilt or innocence of the accused as to prevent a finding of guilty. It says: No person whose opinions are such as to preclude him from finding any defendant guilty of an offense punishable with death shall be compelled or allowed to serve as a juror on the trial of any indictment or information for such an offense. RCW 10.49.050. This statute has always had a logical place in the statutory scheme surrounding capital punishment. Adopted first in 1854 as Laws of 1854, § 106, p. 119, it was reenacted in the criminal practice act of 1873, Laws of 1873, § 244, p. 236  when jurors had no voice in the punishment. In 1854, murder in the first degree was made punishable by death, without option in the jury to direct a lesser punishment. Laws of 1854, § 12, p. 78. The court, on a verdict of guilty of murder in the first degree, had to impose the death penalty. [5] Again, in 1873, the first-degree murder statute was reenacted (Laws of 1873, § 12, p. 182) with death as the only prescribed punishment. Although those statutes specifically empowered the governor to pardon or commute to life imprisonment, neither authorized a jury to do other than return a verdict as to guilt or innocence. The same provisions were carried into the Code of 1881, § 786, p. 160. On each reenactment of the death penalty for murder in the first degree, the section above, disqualifying jurors whose opinions were such as to preclude them from finding one guilty of a crime punishable by death, was similarly reenacted or retained. Laws of 1854, § 106, p. 119; Laws of 1873, § 244, p. 236; Code of 1881, § 1083, p. 202. Similarly, in Laws of 1891, ch. 69, § 1, p. 119, punishment for murder in the first degree was again fixed at death, and the same provision as to jurors, with only a minor change not here pertinent, was reenacted. Laws of 1891, ch. 28, § 67, p. 59. The statute was obviously enacted, reenacted and retained to insure that jurors who sit in capital cases will not, because of personal opposition to the death penalty, evade their sworn duty to return a true verdict solely upon the evidence. In 1909, the legislature, for the first time, departed from a mandatory death sentence and gave the court discretion to prescribe punishment in capital cases. Laws of 1909, ch. 249, § 140, p. 930, declaring: Murder in the first degree shall be punished by death or by imprisonment in the state penitentiary for life, in the discretion of the court. (Italics mine.) Then, in 1913, the death penalty was abolished, Laws of 1913, ch. 167, p. 581, and the legislature made murder in the first degree punishable by life imprisonment. But with the reinstitution of the death penalty in 1919, discretion to prescribe it was shifted from the judge (Laws of 1909, ch. 249, § 140, p. 930) to the jury, and the penalty for murder in the first degree fixed at life imprisonment unless the jury by special verdict affirmatively prescribed the death penalty. Laws of 1919, ch. 112, p. 273 (RCW 9.48.030). Only the jury which tries the case and that jury alone has the power to prescribe the death penalty. RCW 9.48.030. The statute under which the petitioner here was tried, defining and punishing murder in the first degree, explicitly makes the special verdict of the trial jury a precondition to imposition of the death penalty, as follows: Murder in the first degree shall be punishable by imprisonment in the state penitentiary for life, unless the jury shall find that the punishment shall be death .. . the jury shall, if it find the defendant guilty, also find a special verdict as to whether or not the death penalty shall be inflicted ... (Italics mine.) RCW 9.48.030. The issue of the death penalty, yes or no, is thus resolved in a special verdict rendered by the very jury that ascertains guilt. No sensible meaning can be found in the statute except that the jury which tried the case, the particular jury selected, impaneled and sworn to render a true verdict, shall make the decision; that jury and no other is charged by law with deciding the fate of the accused. Thus the legislature has specifically vested in the jury which tries the case, and that jury alone, the power to prescribe the death penalty. In empowering a different jury to decide punishment than the one which determines both guilt and mental condition, the court, I think, now violates these statutes. RCW 4.44.410, 9.48.030. Other statutes relating to the trial of capital cases are compatible only with the one-jury principle. If a plea of insanity or mental irresponsibility is interposed, the court shall instruct the jury when giving the charge that in case of an acquittal by reason of mental irresponsibility the jurors must return special verdicts stating whether the accused committed the crime, whether they acquit him because of insanity or mental irresponsibility at the time of commission, whether the insanity continues and exists at trial, whether if not there is a likelihood of a relapse or recurrence of the mental condition and whether the defendant is unsafe to be at large. RCW 10.76.030. In another section, defendants in capital cases are entitled, on demand, to have a list of petit jurors supplied them at least 24 hours before trial. RCW 10.46.030. This obviously means a list of jurors who will try all issues raised by pleas to the indictment or information. Trial shall be conducted largely in the same manner as are civil cases. RCW 10.46.070. This includes the manner of selecting and impaneling a jury. RCW 10.49.020. Peremptory challenges, 12 in prosecution for capital offenses and 6 for lesser offenses, are authorized by statute. RCW 10.49.060. The term prosecution as used in this section must be taken to mean the trial of all issues raised by indictment or information and plea  and cannot, as the court now does, be read to apply only to the issue of the death sentence. And even the statutory provision for alternate jurors, RCW 10.49.070, contemplates a complete trial on all issues. Again, the oath taken by jurors does not contemplate that separate or different jurors shall try the issue of punishment. It is susceptible of no meaning except that the prescribed oath shall be taken by the jury which will try the entire case: The jury shall be sworn or affirmed well and truly to try the issue between the state and the defendant, according to the evidence, and in capital cases to well and truly try, and true deliverance make between the state and the prisoner at the bar whom they shall have in charge, according to the evidence. RCW 10.49.100. Accordingly, the court, in remanding the case for a trial of the death sentence issue only, exceeds its constitutional powers in the field of criminal procedure and unconstitutionally deprives the accused of a jury selected to try his case in the manner provided by law. In summary, I think the writ should not issue at all. Nothing in this record shows a systematic exclusion of a class or group of like-minded veniremen from the jury. Nothing in the record establishes that the jurors who tried the case had been unfairly selected or impaneled in violation of any rule, precedent or statute. The record is devoid of a showing that the jury was rigged, or stacked, by the state against the accused or that Witherspoon and Boulden warrant or support a vacating of this conviction. Finally, assuming that a new trial is warranted, an assumption in which I do not concur, it must be a new trial on the entire issues of count 2, the count charging the murder of Bonnie Lee Walch, and cannot be limited constitutionally to imposition of the death penalty only. HUNTER, C.J. (dissenting) I concur with the dissent, that the death penalty should be affirmed.