Opinion ID: 1375029
Heading Depth: 3
Heading Rank: 7

Heading: Propriety of Prosecutor's Closing Argument

Text: (54) Defendant contends that the prosecutor committed misconduct when he argued to the jury that life imprisonment without possibility of parole was legally not worse than death, and again when he argued that if you think that by sentencing him to life without possibility of parole that you're going to cause him to sit around and contemplate this for the rest of your life, the rest of his life, I think you're going to make a big mistake. Defendant did not assign misconduct to either statement. He maintains here that the prosecutor's first comment misstated the law, and that the second hinted to the jury that defendant might not spend the rest of his life in prison if not sentenced to death. The result, in his view, was to deprive him of a right he asserts to a fair, reliable, and individualized sentence under the Sixth, Eighth, and Fourteenth Amendments. Because defendant did not assign misconduct to either statement, and there is no reason to believe that an admonition would not have cured any harm, his claims are not preserved on appeal. ( People v. Davis, supra, 10 Cal.4th 463, 537.) Defendant urges that if we so conclude, the failure to assign misconduct to the prosecutor's statements amounts to ineffective assistance of counsel. We disagree. First, the prosecutor's comment that life imprisonment without possibility of parole was legally not worse than death was accurate as a legal matter, whatever philosophical feelings individuals might have on the subject ( People v. Bloom (1989) 48 Cal.3d 1194, 1223, fn. 7 [259 Cal. Rptr. 669, 774 P.2d 698]), for indeed death is the worse punishment. At the time the jury decides the penalty for a death-eligible individual that person will already have been convicted of first degree murder and one or more special circumstances will have been found true, meaning that a minimum penalty of life imprisonment without possibility of parole must be imposed, or the accused will have been convicted of another offense imposing a sentence either of death or of life imprisonment without possibility of parole (e.g., Mil. & Vet. Code, § 1672, subd. (a); Pen. Code, § 128). Thus, the law's command to the trier of fact to weigh aggravating and mitigating circumstances at that time can only mean to consider the possibility of a worse punishment than what the individual was already automatically subject to. (§§ 190.2, subd. (a), 190.3.) The 1977 statute was no different. Moreover, section 190.4, subdivision (b), provides that if a jury twice cannot decide the penalty, the court may order a third jury impaneled or may sentence the defendant to prison. It is unlikely, in our view, that the Legislature would have allowed a court to prescribe the legally worse penalty if the community could not agree that the defendant should receive it. (The 1977 statute's different penalty retrial scheme (see post, p. 882) does not compel a different conclusion.) (55) And the prosecutor's reference to defendant's lack of future reflection was a comment that because he would not spend the rest of his life racked by regret over his murders of Fowler, Chavez, and Carter, imprisonment was an insufficient punishment. He was not arguing that defendant would spend less than the rest of his life in prison if sentenced to that fate.