Opinion ID: 1129438
Heading Depth: 3
Heading Rank: 5

Heading: Extreme Mental Disturbance and Extreme Duress

Text: (34) At the penalty phase, defendant relied in part on evidence of his emotional and developmental problems, resulting in a personality disorder which included a fear of social contact with persons other than his cousin, Ricky Ortega. The court instructed the jury regarding the various statutory sentencing factors, including section 190.3, factors (d) and (g), which permitted the jury to consider whether defendant was under the influence of extreme mental or emotional disturbance (factor (d)), and whether he acted under extreme duress of another person (factor (g)). Defendant unsuccessfully moved the court to strike the word extreme from these instructions on the ground that it improperly limited the mitigating evidence defendant was entitled to submit to the jury. We rejected a similar contention in People v. Ghent (1987) 43 Cal.3d 739 [239 Cal. Rptr. 82, 739 P.2d 1250], involving the 1977 death penalty law and its reference to extreme mental or emotional disturbance (former § 190.3, factor (c)). In Ghent, we stated that the catchall provision of former section 190.3, factor (j) (any other circumstance which extenuates the gravity of the crime) was sufficient to permit the jury to take into account a mental condition of the defendant which, though perhaps not deemed `extreme,' nonetheless mitigates the seriousness of the offense. (P. 776.) We also observed that nothing in the record indicates that the jury failed to give proper weight to defendant's mitigating evidence. ( Ibid. ) In the present case, in addition to giving the catchall section 190.3, factor (k) instruction of the 1978 death penalty law, the court expressly advised the jury that in deciding penalty, it should consider and weigh any sympathetic factor of defendant's background raised by the evidence as a mitigating circumstance. Moreover, the court told the jury that the list of statutory mitigating circumstances merely included examples of some of the factors that you may take into account, and that [y]ou may also consider any other circumstances as reasons for not imposing the death sentence. Defendant notes that the prosecutor argued to the jury that the evidence failed to show any extreme emotional disturbance or duress. But the prosecutor never argued that only an extreme condition could be considered by the jury in deciding penalty, and the court's instructions made it clear the contrary was true. We conclude that the jury was properly instructed in this regard. (The trial court's elaborate instructions regarding the jury's sentencing duties also readily circumvented the pitfalls catalogued in People v. Brown (1985) 40 Cal.3d 512, 538-545 [220 Cal. Rptr. 637, 709 P.2d 440].)