Court Opinion

ID: 9646377
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-23 12:58:08.774896+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T18:11:37.715737
License: Public Domain

LARSEN, Justice,
dissenting.
I dissent. The majority continues to insist that trial judges give juries the option of finding a defendant guilty of voluntary manslaughter (provocation and passion) in all murder cases, even though there is no evidence of manslaughter. In the present case, there was only evidence of murder in the second degree (felony murder), but the majority states:
“The jury could have returned, pursuant to its mercy dispensing power or its awareness of extenuating circumstances, verdicts of either voluntary manslaughter or murder of the third degree even if it found appellant guilty of arson, and found that the arson caused the victim’s death.”
In effect, the majority is requiring a judge to tell a jury that not only does two plus two equal four, but it can, if the jury wishes, equal five. We instruct our juries to render a true and correct verdict based on the law (which should emanate from the facts) and facts presented at trial and neither sympathy nor passion is to influence them. Juries for centuries have been instructed, no matter how agonizing, to reach a true verdict. Juries are the guardians of truth. The majority wants juries to be able to render verdicts based on law which has nothing to do with the case so that the jury may, contrary to the facts, dispense “mercy”. Mer*117cy is not the function of a jury — truth is. We have enough “mercy giving” entities: a sentencing judge, the parole board, the governor, etc. Now the majority would have a jury leave the realm of truth and become enmeshed in the world of social engineering. This perverts one of the foundations of our democracy, i. e. the jury system. Any confusion by the jury in this case was due to this perversion. I, therefore, dissent.1
NIX, J., joins in this dissenting opinion.

. I adopt the legal rational set forth very ably by Mr. Justice Nix in his dissent in Commonwealth v. Michael Francis Anthony Manning, 477 Pa. 495, 384 A.2d 1197 (1978).