Opinion ID: 30755
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 2

Heading: Applicability to Robertson

Text: From the Penry I opinion it is clear that the Court considered Penry’s abused childhood, as well as his mental retardation, to be independently relevant mitigating evidence that the jury should have been instructed that it could consider and give effect to in determining whether to impose the death penalty. In reversing Penry’s death sentence, the Court concluded that “his mitigating evidence of mental retardation and childhood abuse has relevance to his moral culpability beyond the scope of the special issues, and that the jury was unable to express its reasoned moral response to that evidence in determining whether death was the appropriate response.” Penry I, 492 U.S. at 322 (emphasis added); see also id. at 312 (listing as separate evidence of Penry’s possible reduced personal culpability “his mental retardation, arrested emotional development, and abused background”); id. at 323 (“[B]ecause of his history of childhood abuse, that same juror [who concluded that 78 Penry acted ‘deliberately,’] could also conclude that Penry was less morally culpable than defendants who have no such excuse[.]”) As Robertson has presented evidence of childhood abuse here, Penry I, along with Penry II, should be outcome determinative. Under Penry I, the special issues given at Robertson’s trial, which were identical to those given in Penry’s trial, were an inadequate vehicle for allowing a jury to consider Robertson’s child abuse evidence in making a reasoned death penalty determination. And the nullification instruction does not change this result.40 Penry II, 532 U.S. at 803-04. The majority responds to this clear textual command from the Court that the special issues are constitutionally infirm where a defendant presents evidence of childhood abuse with two arguments. First, it argues that “[c]hildhood abuse alone is not systematically discussed by Penry I” because there the evidence of child abuse “was inseparable from the Court’s greater concern with Penry’s mental retardation and poor impulse control.” Second, the majority contends that it is neither “logically or empirically true that generic childhood abuse, of whatever duration, type, or severity, bears the same characteristics as mental retardation.” 40