Court Opinion

ID: 9757243
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-28 22:27:26.841516+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T07:28:37.097647
License: Public Domain

PAPADAKOS, Justice,
concurring and dissenting.
Our Court is unanimous in its affirmance of the conviction of Appellant of murder of the first degree. His history now. includes the criminal taking of the lives of two innocent human beings. This history is now undeniable fact. The jury considered this historical fact and determined that it constituted a significant history of felony convictions involving the use or threat of violence and, finding no mitigating circumstances to outweigh this aggravating circumstance, determined that Appellant be sentenced to death. Nothing is clearer in my mind than the correctness of the verdict and sentence in this case having been reached within the guide*293lines and mandates of the Pennsylvania Death Penalty Statute.
Yet, the battle lines have been drawn on our Court and we are engaged in logo-polemics over the “interpretation” of subsection (d)(9), 42 Pa.C.S. § 9711(d)(9), which reads, “(9) The defendant has a significant history of felony convictions involving the use or threat of violence to the person.”
My brethren concentrate on the word “convictions”. They labor over its meaning. They query: Did the legislature mean one conviction? Did it mean more than one conviction? Does it include the latest conviction?
The legislature has used the present tense “the defendant has (not had) a significant history” thus belieing any temporal restriction to a period before the latest conviction. The legislature uses the plural “convictions” for ease of expression. How stilted it would be to say, “the defendant has a significant history of a felony conviction.” Yet, the legislature has said exactly that, in better language, in aggravating circumstance (10).
I can see nothing in the sentence used by the legislature which expressly or inferentially excludes from a jury’s consideration any of defendant’s felonious endeavors which involve the use or threat of violence to the person. I believe that the essence of this aggravating circumstance is the significance that can be attached to a defendant’s history of convictions.
In his Concurring Opinion, Mr. Justice Hutchinson correctly points out that the history cannot be significant “unless that history involves more than one such conviction.” He further points out that a single prior conviction “plainly satisfies the qualitative aspect of the statutory phrase ‘significant history’ because of its close similarity to the conduct which resulted in the victim’s death in the present case.” For example, if a person heinously butchers his paramour and is tried and convicted of third degree murder, then, five years later, heinously butchers a second *294paramour and is tried and convicted of murder of the first degree, in the absence of mitigating circumstances, such person has surely established a “significant history”, satisfying aggravating circumstance (9) and a jury would be warranted in determining that a sentence of death should be imposed. We must never lose sight of the fact that the jury could exercise its discretion in this hypothetical case and refuse to determine that a sentence of death be imposed. This discretionary aspect in aggravating circumstance (9) is what differentiates it from aggravating circumstance (10) which permits no exercise of discretion. Once it is established that the defendant has committed a felony for which a sentence of life imprisonment or death is imposable, “the verdict must be a sentence of death” in the absence of mitigating circumstances. 42 Pa.C.S. § 9711(c)(iv).
For the foregoing reasons, as well as the rationale set forth in the Concurring and Dissenting Opinion of Mr. Justice Larsen, I dissent to the decision of the majority to vacate the sentence of death and remand for the imposition of a life sentence. I concur in the affirmance of Appellant’s convictions. I would call upon the legislature to re-examine the issue and make the necessary amendments if it is found that the majority has misinterpreted the legislative intent.