Court Opinion

ID: 9633763
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-22 11:59:09.155973+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T09:11:02.772646
License: Public Domain

MOSK,J.
—I dissent.
Defendant’s trial was rife with error, under the United States Constitution as well as state law, bearing on both the issue of guilt and that of penalty.
The majority acknowledge a number of violations. Among the most serious was the typewritten instruction at the penalty phase that directed the jury to impose life imprisonment with possibility of parole if it had a reasonable doubt as to the appropriate punishment. Despite the majority’s efforts at rationalization, this error may well have been a factor in the jury’s ultimate decision. Certainly, the jurors—who revealed that they were divided on penalty—were altogether perplexed. Both of their questions to the court asked for an explanation of the instruction—the first impliedly and the second expressly. Not only did the court give no assistance, it *236insisted the instruction was “self-explanatory.” The result was a self-explanatory error.
I find other violations in addition. For example, the accomplice instructions at the guilt phase were improper. Defendant’s defense was nonparticipation—specifically, that it was not he who perpetrated the crimes, but rather his companions Avette Barrett and Allison Eckstrom. The accomplice instructions unfairly undermined the defense. They told the jury that Barrett and Eckstrom were aiders and abetters as a matter of law—and thereby necessarily implied that defendant was, in fact, the perpetrator.
In my view, reversal is required. In arriving at the opposite conclusion, the majority state that even when considered together, the numerous errors are nonprejudicial under the standard of Chapman v. California (1967) 386 U.S. 18 [17 L.Ed.2d 705, 87 S.Ct. 824, 24 A.L.R.3d 1065]. Under that test, “before a federal constitutional error can be held harmless, the court must be able to declare a belief that it was harmless beyond a reasonable doubt.” (Id. at p. 24 [17 L.Ed.2d at pp. 710-711].) The “burden of proof” as to prejudice rests on the People. “Certainly error, constitutional error, . . . casts on someone other than the person prejudiced by it a burden to show that it was harmless .... [T]he beneficiary of a constitutional error [is required] to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that the error complained of did not contribute to the verdict obtained.” (Ibid. [17 L.Ed.2d at p. 710].)
On this record, I simply cannot declare a belief that the numerous errors at defendant’s trial were harmless beyond a reasonable doubt. The People have not carried their burden of proving, to that high degree of certainty, that the violations did not contribute to the result. That does not surprise. Some of the defects—such as the instructional improprieties noted above— went to the very heart of the jury’s determination of guilt and penalty. It is arguable, to be sure, that the errors were harmless under some more tolerant standard. But such a test does not apply here.
No doubt the principled application of harmless-error analysis is often a difficult task. It calls on a reviewing court to resolve the elusive question of prejudice. It also requires individual judges who may be personally satisfied with the outcome of a trial to set that result aside for what may appear to be somewhat abstract reasons implicating the integrity of the legal system as a whole.
Regrettably, in order to salvage judgments of death that have been tainted by error, this court has often failed in this task in recent years. (See, e.g., People v. Wright (1990) 52 Cal.3d 367 [276 Cal.Rptr. 731, 802 P.2d 221]; People v. Whitt (1990) 51 Cal.3d 620 [274 Cal.Rptr. 252, 798 P.2d 849]; *237People v. Bell (1989) 49 Cal.3d 502 [262 Cal.Rptr. 1, 778 P.2d 129]; People v. Sheldon (1989) 48 Cal.3d 935 [258 Cal.Rptr. 242, 771 P.2d 1330]; People v. Allison (1989) 48 Cal.3d 879 [258 Cal.Rptr. 208, 771 P.2d 1294]; People v. Robertson (1989) 48 Cal.3d 18 [255 Cal.Rptr. 631, 767 P.2d 1109].)
In order to find that an error at trial was harmless beyond a reasonable doubt, an appellate court must obviously review the record as a whole under what has generally been termed “the totality of the circumstances.” This point is the subject of a thoughtful analysis by Justice Antonin Scalia in an article entitled The Rule of Law as a Law of Rules (1989) 56 U.Chi.L.Rev. 1175. He cogently declares that “we should recognize that, at the point where an appellate judge says that. . . [an] issue must be decided on the basis of the totality of the circumstances, or by a balancing of all the factors involved, he begins to resemble a finder of fact more than a determiner of law.” (Id. at p. 1182.) He adds that “To adopt such an approach ... is effectively to conclude that uniformity is not a particularly important objective . . . .” (Id. at p. 1179.) To the contrary, achieving uniformity in the law, and properly monitoring the conduct of trial courts, are the functions of this appellate court, the only court that reviews capital cases.
Because I cannot conclude that the numerous errors at both the guilt and penalty phases of defendant’s trial were harmless beyond a reasonable doubt, I would reverse the judgment in its entirety.