Court Opinion

ID: 9734515
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-26 17:36:55.015786+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T18:26:48.953633
License: Public Domain

SAYLOR, Justice,
concurring.
On the basis of this Court’s precedent, see, e.g., Commonwealth v. Hackett, 534 Pa. 210, 222-23, 627 A.2d 719, 725 (1993), as well as the interpretations of the United States Supreme Court,1 I am obliged to agree that a jury instruction *615that mirrors the language of Pennsylvania’s death penalty statute, 42 Pa.C.S. § 9711(c)(iv), does not violate the dictates of the Supreme Court’s decision in Mills v. Maryland, 486 U.S. 367, 108 S.Ct. 1860, 100 L.Ed.2d 384 (1988).
Nevertheless, in my view such an instruction contains a degree of imprecision that can be avoided merely by employing Pennsylvania Suggested Standard Criminal Jury Instruction 15.2502H(3), which removes any doubt concerning a juror’s role in assessing mitigating circumstances. The model instruction provides as follows:
When voting on the general findings, you are to regard a particular aggravating circumstance as present only if you all agree that it is present. On the other hand, each of you is free to regard a particular mitigating circumstance as present despite what other jurors may believe.
(emphasis in original). The mechanics of the accompanying suggested verdict slip track the model instruction, further directing individual jurors in the manner in which they should apply the statutorily prescribed considerations in their penalty determination.
To promote clarity in this most crucial of jury determinations, and to align our jurisprudence with that of federal courts in this circuit, see Frey v. Fulcomer, 132 F.3d 916 (1997), cert. denied, - U.S. -, 118 S.Ct. 2076, 141 L.Ed.2d 151 (1998); Jermyn v. Horn, 1998 WL 754567, 1998 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 16939 (M.D.Pa. Oct. 27, 1998), I would affirmatively require Pennsylvania trial courts to instruct capital sentencing juries in accordance with the standard instruction.
Justice NIGRO joins this Concurring Opinion.

. See generally Buchanan v. Angelone, 522 U.S. 269, - n. 4, 118 S.Ct. 757, 762 n. 4, 139 L.Ed.2d 702 (1998) (suggesting in dictum that capital jury instruction not be subjected to "a strained parsing of the language,” but instead be given "the ordinary meaning of [its] language and structure”); Boyde v. California, 494 U.S. 370, 381, 110 S.Ct. 1190, 1198, 108 L.Ed.2d 316 (1990) (directing that, when evaluating a claim that a jury instruction is ambiguous and hence subject to an erroneous interpretation, courts must recognize that jurors are not left to evaluate the instruction’s meaning individually, but that ”[d]ifferences among *615them in interpretation of instructions may be thrashed out in the deliberative process, with commonsense understanding of the instructions ... likely to prevail”); Blystone v. Pennsylvania, 494 U.S. 299, 305, 110 S.Ct. 1078, 1082, 108 L.Ed.2d 255 (1990) (rejecting a claim that Pennsylvania’s death penalty statute is "unconstitutionally mandatory” due to its requirement that the jury set the penalty at death if it unanimously finds one or more aggravators and no mitigators, or one or more aggravators that outweigh mitigators).