Opinion ID: 1172220
Heading Depth: 1
Heading Rank: 22

Heading: The district court properly refused Lisle's proposed jury instruction 8A

Text: Lisle's attorney proposed the following jury instruction: Evidence has been presented concerning other arrests, convictions, or other circumstances. This evidence can be considered by you for character purposes only. You are instructed that this evidence can only be considered by you after you have determined whether or not the state has proved an aggravating circumstance or circumstances beyond a reasonable doubt, whether mitigating circumstances have been shown to exist and whether or not mitigating circumstances have been shown to outweigh one or more of the aggravating circumstances. As you have been instructed in instruction # 7, death eligibility can only be considered based on the weighing of mitigating and aggravating circumstances. This character evidence cannot be considered in determining the death eligibility of the Defendant. Only after you have made that determination may you then consider this evidence in arriving at a penalty. The lower court denied this instruction because the judge believed that it misstated the law. Specifically, the judge stated that even if the jury determined that Lisle was not death eligible, it may still consider character evidence in deciding whether to impose a sentence of life with or without the possibility of parole. [T]he instruction must correctly state the law. . . . [I]f a proffered instruction misstates the law or is adequately covered by other instructions, it need not be given. Barron v. State, 105 Nev. 767, 773, 783 P.2d 444, 448 (1989). Lisle has offered no authority to support his interpretation that character evidence cannot be considered until after the jury determines he is death eligible. Whereas, Pellegrini, 104 Nev. at 630, 764 P.2d at 488, held that defendant's character is relevant to the jury's determination of the appropriate sentence for a capital crime; Pellegrini does not limit the relevance of character evidence to only after the jury decides the defendant is death eligible. Rather, it is relevant to determine the sentence. Therefore, we conclude that proposed jury instruction 8A misstates when character evidence may be used in the penalty phase. Moreover, instruction 7 informs the jury that it must determine whether there are aggravating circumstances and mitigating factors. It further instructs the jury to weigh the aggravators with the mitigators to determine if the defendant is death eligible. Accordingly, the remainder of instruction 8A is adequately covered by instruction 7. Therefore, the district court did not err by disallowing instruction 8A.