Opinion ID: 677086
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 3

Heading: Penalty Phase Instruction

Text: 40 Griffin next claims that his Eighth and Fourteenth Amendment rights were violated by an instruction requiring the jury to first unanimously agree that a mitigating circumstance or circumstances existed before weighing any mitigating evidence against the aggravating circumstance or circumstances. Griffin claims that the challenged instruction violates McKoy v. North Carolina, 494 U.S. 433, 110 S.Ct. 1227, 108 L.Ed.2d 369 (1990) and Mills v. Maryland, 486 U.S. 367, 108 S.Ct. 1860, 100 L.Ed.2d 384 (1988), by requiring the jurors to find each mitigating circumstance unanimously. The relevant part of jury instruction number twenty-two charged: 41 If you unanimously decide that a sufficient mitigating circumstance or circumstances exist which outweigh the aggravating circumstance or circumstances found by you to exist, then you must return a verdict fixing defendant's punishment at imprisonment for life by the Division of Corrections without eligibility for probation or parole until he has served a minimum of fifty years of his sentence. 42 Jury instruction number twenty-three charged: 43 Even if you decide that a sufficient mitigating circumstance or circumstances do not exist which outweigh the aggravating circumstance or circumstances found to exist, you are not compelled to fix death as the punishment. Whether that is to be your final decision rests with you. 44 In contrast, the jury instructions in McKoy 2 and Mills 3 mandated that jurors unanimously agree upon a mitigating circumstance or circumstances. The district court reasoned that instruction number twenty-two in Griffin did not require the jurors to unanimously agree on any particular mitigating factor, as in Mills and McKoy, but rather, instructed the jurors that they must unanimously agree that the mitigating factors they found outweigh the aggravating factors before a life sentence is mandated. (Emphasis added.) Memorandum and Order, July 2, 1993, at p. 64-65. In considering a penalty of death there was no substantial probability that reasonable jurors thought, in the words of Mills, that they were precluded from considering any mitigating evidence unless all 12 jurors agreed on the existence of a particular such circumstance. Id. at 384, 108 S.Ct. at 1870. We agree with the district court that the challenged jury instructions do not violate McKoy or Mills and are not unconstitutional.