Opinion ID: 2590211
Heading Depth: 3
Heading Rank: 5

Heading: Denial of Motion for Jury View of Scene Where Victim Hall's Body Was Found

Text: Defendant contends the trial court erred in denying his motion, pursuant to section 1119, [8] to transport the jury to the remote mountain area where the body of Mark Hall was found. Defense counsel argued that viewing the scene was the only way by which the jury could appreciate both the difficulty of defendant's disposing of the body in that location and the dissimilarity of the method of the Hall murder to others with which defendant was charged. The trial court concluded the jury was sufficiently assisted to determine defendant's guilt or innocence of the charge by testimony of witnesses for both the prosecution and the defense about the various routes to the scene, together with the admission into evidence of a map and photographs of the area, and that a view would thus be superfluous. This erroneous ruling, defendant argues, deprived him of his constitutional right to present a defense and undermined the reliability of the judgment of death imposed upon him. Whether to permit the jury to view the scene of a crime falls within the court's discretion, reviewable for abuse. ( People v. Price, supra, 1 Cal.4th at p. 422, 3 Cal.Rptr.2d 106, 821 P.2d 610.) By that standard, we find no error in the trial court's ruling. The photographs admitted into evidence and the testimony of several witnesses made clear the remote and rugged nature of the terrain where Hall's body was found; the jury was thus enabled to draw its own inferences about the probability defendant was capable of committing the crime and the differences between this offense and the others with which defendant was charged. Defendant was not denied the right to present a defense. Nor has he demonstrated the trial court's ruling undermined the reliability of the death judgment that is mandated by the Eighth and Fourteenth Amendments to the federal Constitution.