Court Opinion

ID: 9574376
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-21 21:04:28.925514+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T12:44:27.376607
License: Public Domain

Hunt, Justice,
concurring.
I write separately to note, with reference to the dissent of Chief Justice Clarke, that Suggested Pattern Jury Instructions, Vol. 2, Criminal Cases, does not provide separate preliminary instructions for a jury which is hearing only the sentencing phase. The Council of Superior Court Judges may be well advised to draft charges for this purpose, taking into account the concerns raised by that dissent. Nonetheless, whether or not such charges are available to the court from that source, the defendant is not excused from requesting those charges he believes necessary to elaborate upon the issue of “residual” *110doubt.3 This defendant made no such request nor objected , to the charge as given.4 Surely, the preliminary statement of a trial court that this jury cannot consider the issue of guilt or innocence because this jury is empaneled only to decide punishment, cannot be error, much less reversible error.
I am authorized to state that Presiding Justice Smith joins in this concurrence.

 The term “residual doubt” is confusing. While any juror can have doubt about a defendant’s guilt, only a juror who sat upon the guilt-innocence phase of the trial and who did not entertain a reasonable doubt, can entertain a residual doubt, a doubt leftover from the finding of guilt. The dissent’s concern, I believe, is that we do not eviscerate, or in any way diminish, the right of a juror empaneled to fix punishment at a resentencing trial to entertain the same reservation about the defendant’s culpability as if he or she had been previously empaneled to consider the issue of guilt or innocence.
When a case is retried as to sentence, both the state and the defendant are entitled to offer evidence on the issue of guilt or innocence, not because the validity of the conviction is at issue, but because the jury needs to examine the circumstances of the offense ... in order to decide intelligently the question of punishment. (Emphasis supplied.)
Alderman v. State, 254 Ga. 206, 210 (8) (327 SE2d 168) (1985).
Nothing in the court’s charge, taken as a whole, prevented, or even discouraged, the jury’s examination of those circumstances.

 The defendant’s general reservation of objections to the charge, at the conclusion of the charge, purports to preserve this issue for review. But see Unified Appeal, Outline of Proceedings, Par. 9-12, § (B) (3) (a) which prohibits the reservation of objections to the sentencing-phase charge. One might further question whether a reservation of objections applies, in any event, to preliminary instructions.