Opinion ID: 1351576
Heading Depth: 4
Heading Rank: 7

Heading: Claim of Error on Refusal to Instruct on Mercy

Text: (32) Defendant requested the court to instruct the jury that In this part of the trial you may consider pity, sympathy, or mercy for the defendant in deciding on the appropriate penalty for him. (Italics added.) The court refused. Defendant contends that the court erred. He claims that the requested instruction was legally correct: the law, he says, grants the jury authority to choose life over death simply because the former is desirable and the latter is not. We disagree. Neither statute nor Constitution gives the jury the right to exercise what is essentially godlike power. Defendant argues to the contrary. He says that the 1978 death penalty law grants the jury authority to dispense mercy. We are not persuaded: there is no adequate support for the assertion. He then says that the Eighth Amendment grants such authority. Again we are not persuaded. To be sure, Nothing in any of [the] cases [of the United States Supreme Court] suggests that the decision to afford an individual defendant mercy violates the Constitution. ( Gregg v. Georgia (1976) 428 U.S. 153, 199 [49 L.Ed.2d 859, 889, 96 S.Ct. 2909] (lead opn. of Stewart, Powell, and Stevens, JJ.); accord, McCleskey v. Kemp (1987) 481 U.S. 279, 307 [95 L.Ed.2d 262, 288, 107 S.Ct. 1756].) But nothing in any of those cases suggests that such a decision is in fact authorized by the Constitution. At its root, the Eighth Amendment is simply prohibitory: it bars imposition of punishment that is unduly severe. (See, e.g., People v. Marshall, supra, 50 Cal.3d at p. 938.) It does not grant power, and hence does not authorize imposition of punishment that is unduly lenient. (Compare People v. Andrews (1989) 49 Cal.3d 200, 227-228 [260 Cal. Rptr. 583, 776 P.2d 285] [rejecting a similar claim of instructional error].)