Opinion ID: 2070845
Heading Depth: 1
Heading Rank: 13

Heading: The Elderly and the Terminally Ill

Text: Defendant hypothesizes a 70-year-old or terminally ill defendant who is convicted of only one count of capital murder. A minimum sentence of 20 to 25 years to life would exceed this defendant's life expectancy, but state and federal proscriptions against cruel and unusual punishment would bar imposition of the death penalty. Accordingly, defendant argues that the deadlock instruction, even if not unconstitutionally coercive in some applications, is still facially unconstitutional because it violates the Eighth Amendment. Of course, senior citizens do not swell the ranks of first-degree murderers in New York. According to defendant, out of 560 first-degree murder prosecutions in New York from September 5, 1995 through November 14, 2005, only one involved a 70 year old. There are no comparable figures for the terminally ill, but it is probably safe to surmise that few of these 560 prosecutions involved defendants known to be near death. Assuming a prosecutor in the future is foolhardy enough to seek the death penalty against an elderly or terminally ill defendant on one count of capital murder, and assuming that a jury imposes the death sentence, after hearing mitigating evidence that would presumably dwell on the defendant's age and health, the death sentence would never survive Eighth Amendment review, or examination for proportionality under CPL 470.30 (3) (b) (Court of Appeals mandated to determine whether the sentence of death is excessive or disproportionate to the penalty imposed in similar cases considering both the crime and the defendant). In short, the notion that the deadlock instruction infringes the constitutional rights of the elderly and the terminally ill is beyond farfetched; it is a chimera. Even in First Amendment overbreadth review, where the party mounting a facial challenge need not demonstrate wholesale constitutional impairment, the courts look at whether the hypothesized constitutional infirmity is something more than insubstantial ( see Barton, 8 NY3d at 75-76 [The test for determining overbreadth is whether the law on its face prohibits a real and substantial amount of constitutionally protected conduct. (T)he mere fact that one can conceive of some impermissible applications of a statute is not sufficient to render it susceptible to an overbreadth challenge (internal quotation marks and citations omitted)]; see also People v Broadie, 37 NY2d 100, 119 [1975] [upholding Rockefeller Drug Laws, which were challenged on Eighth Amendment grounds, as facially constitutional although in some rare case on its particular facts it may be found that the statutes have been unconstitutionally applied]).