Court Opinion

ID: 9662112
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-23 22:59:38.785736+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T18:14:36.920572
License: Public Domain

COCHRAN, J.,
filed a dissenting opinion in which
KELLER, P.J., KEASLER, and HERVEY, JJ., joined.
I join Presiding Judge Keller’s dissenting opinion because I do not think that there is a reasonable probability that the jury in this particular trial, given this specific evidence and these advocates’ excellent closing arguments, “applied the chal*795lenged instruction in a way that prevents the consideration of constitutionally relevant evidence.”1
The jurors certainly could have done so, but I cannot conclude that they would have done so or actually did do so. And it is this distinction between “could,” “would,” and “did” that is at the heart of the Supreme Court’s discussion in Boyde.2 There is a possibility that the jury felt itself precluded from considering appellant’s evidence of mental slowness as being among the “other” circumstances that would mitigate his moral culpability. But Boyde requires the showing of “a reasonable likelihood” that the jury felt so restrained.3 We are confronted "with a claim that a jury instruction, though not erroneous, is sufficiently ambiguous to be “subject to an erroneous interpretation.” 4 To evaluate this instruction, we should not engage in a technical parsing of its language; instead, we must “approach the instructions in that same way that the jury would — with a ‘common-sense understanding of the instructions in the light of all that has taken place at the trial.’ ”5 Thus, we must look beyond the four corners of the jury instructions themselves to the content and conduct of the trial.
This jury was selected solely to answer the special punishment issues in a death penalty case. The jury heard more than fifty witnesses during the course of the four week trial. The primary focus of that trial was the character and conduct of Johnny Paul Penry throughout his life.
The State presented one vision and version of him: he was a bad seed who sprouted into a poisonous apple. He was not, according to the State’s witnesses, mentally retarded or mentally defective. He was a “slow learner” because he did not want to learn. He had a “difficult childhood” and was raised by an imperfect mother who was mentally ill. But, according to the State, “she also had a very *796problem child here at a very early age, a young capital murderer that was growing up in her midst.” He was educationally and socially deprived as a child, but he was also a “faker,” a “manipulator” with “an anti-social personality”. He had unrepent-edly raped before, and was sent to prison because his victim — left alive — could identify him. When he raped again, he was shrewd enough to kill his victim so she could not identify him and have him sent back to prison. Whatever his educational deficiencies, he was “street smart” enough to be fully accountable and morally culpable for his capital crime.
The defense presented an entirely different version of him: Johnny Paul Penry was a pitiable man with severe mental impairments and a “history of severe and serious and sustained child abuse and torture.” He was diagnosed at an early age with mental retardation and placed in a special class for the mentally retarded. Instead of receiving love and support for his mental deficiencies, his mother treated him “like an animal.” She locked him, up in his room, repeatedly beat him, threatened him with a butcher knife, and made him eat his own feces because he had a “broken brain.” According to defense counsel, “He’s not just mean and bad, through and through. He wants to improve himself. He doesn’t have much to work with. But he wants to.” These were “mitigating circumstances in this case that reduce moral blameworthiness.”
Four weeks of trial testimony circled around the intersection of Johnny Paul Penry’s mental abilities and moral culpability and to what extent his mental “slowness” was related to his deplorable childhood.
The potential ambiguity in the jury instruction is caused by a single word, “other,” contained within the application instruction for the fourth special issue:
Therefore, you are instructed that if you believe from all the evidence that the Defendant is a person with mental retardation, then you are, instructed to answer Special Issue No. 4 “yes.” However, if you do not believe from all the evidence that the Defendant is a person with mental retardation, then you shall follow the Court’s instructions previously given herein concerning the appropriate answer to Special Issue No. 4 and consider whether any other mitigating circumstance or circumstances exist as defined herein.
The potential ambiguity then is whether there is a reasonable likelihood that, once the jurors unanimously concluded that Penry wad'not “mentally retarded” as that term had been legally defined, they (erroneously) believed that they could not consider any of the evidence concerning his mental “slowness.” That is, did these jurors think that they were prohibited from continuing to consider the evidence of his lack of educational progress, his indisputably low I.Q., and the wealth of evidence concerning “deficits or impairments in present adaptive functioning” in the areas of “[cjommunication, self-care, home living, social/interpersonal skills, use of community resources, self-direction, functional academic skills, work, leisure, health, and safety” that existed before the age of eighteen? If so, in answering the fourth special issue, the jurors would have ignored the vast majority of the evidence admitted during this lengthy trial.
It seems manifestly unlikely that not a single juror would have protested and said, “Wait, surely we may consider that same evidence of some level of mental deficiency and how Johnny Paul Penry’s mental slowness affected his upbringing, character, conduct, and moral culpability?” At least the jurors might reasonably have been expected to send out a note to the judge *797requesting clarification if they had questions concerning the meaning of the word “other” in this context.6
The absence of such a note or any other sign from the jurors that they did not understand what was expected of them suggests that one of two things happened: they all agreed that “other” did exclude consideration of all mental-slowness evidence or they all agreed that it did not. But to conclude that they would have ignored the mental-slowness evidence would have required them to ignore the content and tenor of every word in the jury instructions except the word “other.” The common-sense gist of Special Issue Number Four is simply this: “If you believe that there is any credible reason why this man should not be executed, you must vote for life imprisonment.” To conclude that it is “reasonably likely” that this jury did not get the message requires one to assume that they were all mentally slow.
Instead, it is a reasonable likelihood that this jury, like the two previous juries, believed that the State’s version and vision of Johnny Paul Penry and his moral culpability was a more compelling one than that presented by the defense. And it was their right to reach that conclusion based upon all of the evidence and a commonsense reading of the jury instructions.

. Boyde v. California, 494 U.S. 370, 380, 110 S.Ct. 1190, 108 L.Ed.2d 316 (1990).

. Id. at 379-80, 110 S.Ct. 1190. The Supreme Court forthrightly admitted that "[tjhe legal standard for reviewing jury instructions claimed to restrict impermissibly a jury’s consideration of relevant evidence is less than clear from our cases.” Id. at 378, 110 S.Ct. 1190. The Court stated that in one case it had said that "[tjhe question ... is ... what a reasonable juror could have understood the charge as meaning.” Id. (citation omitted). But in another case it had referred to both what a reasonable juror “could " have done and what he "would ” have done. Id. at 379, 110 S.Ct. 1190 (citation omitted). In still another case, the Court phrased the matter as whether it is probable that “reasonable men might derive a meaning from the instructions given other than the proper meaning.” Id. (citation omitted). In Boyde, the Supreme Court concluded that "[ajlthough there may not be great differences among these various phrasings, it is important to settle upon a single formulation for this Court and other courts to employ in deciding this kind of federal question.” Id. The legal formulation settled upon was: "whether there is a reasonable likelihood that the jury applied the challenged instruction in a way that prevents the consideration of constitutionally relevant evidence.” Id. at 380, 110 S.Ct. 1190.

. Weeks v. Angelone, 528 U.S. 225, 236, 120 S.Ct. 727, 145 L.Ed.2d 727 (2000) (citing Boyde, and holding that death-penalty mitigating-evidence instructions were constitutionally adequate); see also Estelle v. McGuire, 502 U.S. 62, 74-75, 112 S.Ct. 475, 116 L.Ed.2d 385 (1991) (stating that "[wjhile the instruction was not as clear as it might have been, we find that there is not a 'reasonable likelihood’ that the jury would have concluded that this instruction, read in the context of other instructions, authorized the use of propensity evidence pure and simple”).

. Weeks, 528 U.S. at 238, 120 S.Ct. 727 (Stevens, J., dissenting).

. Johnson v. Texas, 509 U.S. 350, 368, 113 S.Ct. 2658, 125 L.Ed.2d 290 (1993) (quoting Boyde, 494 U.S. at 381, 110 S.Ct. 1190).

. See Armstrong v. Toler, 24 U.S. 258, 279, 11 Wheat. 258, 6 L.Ed. 468 (1826) (opinion of Marshall, C J.) (“Had the juiy desired further information, they might, and probably would, have signified their desire to the Court.").