Opinion ID: 852371
Heading Depth: 1
Heading Rank: 11

Heading: Overbreadth of the Torture and Mutilation Aggravator

Text: The defendant contends that Indiana law is constitutionally deficient in failing to provide clear and objective standards and detailed guidance regarding the aggravating circumstance for mutilation or torture. The statute expresses this aggravating circumstance as follows: The defendant burned, mutilated, or tortured the victim while the victim was alive. Ind. Code § 35-50-2-9(b)(11). In this case, the penalty phase jury was charged with determining whether the State had proven beyond a reasonable doubt that the defendant tortured the victim while the victim was still alive and/or the [d]efendant mutilated the victim while the victim was still live. Appellant's App'x at 1001. We confronted a similar contention in Baird v. State, in which the defendant claimed that a multiple murder aggravator based on knowing murders fails to narrow the class of death eligible murders and was overbroad and vague. 604 N.E.2d 1170, 1183 (Ind.1992), cert. denied, 510 U.S. 893, 114 S.Ct. 255, 126 L.Ed.2d 208 (1993). Remarking on the structure of our statutory death-penalty procedure, we held that it adequately structures and channels the discretion of the jury and the court. Id. Rejecting the defendant's claim, we concluded that the legislative decision to designate the aggravator as indicative of appreciably greater culpability is neither arbitrary nor illogical. Id. at 1183-84. Our analysis in Baird applies equally to the challenged aggravators in this case. The trial court instructed the jury as to the meaning of the terms torture and mutilation: Torture is an appreciable period of pain or punishment intentionally inflicted and designed either to coerce the victim or for the torturer's sadistic indulgence. Put another way, torture is the gratuitous infliction of substantial pain or suffering in excess of that associated with the commission of the charged crime. Mutilation means to cut off or permanently destroy an essential part of a body or to cut up or alter radically so as to make imperfect. In order for mutilation to be found as an aggravating circumstance, there must be mutilation of the victim that goes beyond the act of killing. Final Instructions No. 21 and 26, Appellant's App'x at 1004-05. The instruction defining torture is taken verbatim from this Court's definition in Leone v. State, 797 N.E.2d 743, 747 (Ind.2003), and Nicholson v. State, 768 N.E.2d 443, 447 (Ind. 2002). The legislature's use of the term mutiliation is well understood without further explication. Neither torture nor mutilation, particularly as defined for this jury, present any substantial risk that jurors will fail to apply a consistent standard in determining whether the defendant is death-penalty eligible.