Court Opinion

ID: 9776045
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-29 19:17:13.704758+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T07:32:33.284882
License: Public Domain

*150BLACKMAR, Judge,
concurring.
After some hesitation, I concur.
I believe that the trial judge should have excused juror Morris. His coarse and insensitive remark about putting the defendant “in a jail cell at my expense” gives no reasonable expectation of sober and reflective views about the punishment. Yet defense counsel did not pursue the point on voir dire and did not preserve it in a motion for new trial.
I am also persuaded that juror Melton could properly be excused under Witherspoon v. Illinois, 391 U.S. 510, 88 S.Ct. 1770, 20 L.Ed.2d 776 (1968). Witherspoon provides a rare exception to the salutary proposition that error may not be predicated on the sustension of a challenge for cause, in holding that a juror may not be so excused because of a mere predilection against the death penalty. Even one excuse in violation of the Witherspoon standard requires reversal of the death sentence, Burns v. Estelle, 592 F.2d 1297 (5th Cir.1979) and, surely, the Court may not correct an erroneous excuse simply because the juror himself could have asserted a statutory exemption from service.
We have a special responsibility in death sentence cases under § 565.014.3, RSMo 1978. The rules of preservation of error should be relaxed, especially as to the requirement of renewing claims of error in a motion for trial under Rule 27.20. This case, however, is a particularly aggravated one in which a hired killer traveled from Illinois and coldly stalked his prey. I seriously doubt that the result would have been different if the state had been obliged to use a peremptory challenge against Melton or if the defendant had been afforded an additional peremptory.