Court Opinion

ID: 9850993
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-09-24 05:05:31.284294+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T09:20:46.746362
License: Public Domain

BROUSSARD, J.
I concur in the result. This is a troubling case because, as Justice Mosk’s dissent suggests, defendant is not typical of those persons sentenced to death. I cannot, however, join his opinion; I do not believe it is unconstitutionally disproportionate to impose a more severe sentence upon defendant, the actual killer, than upon his accomplices. Instead the problem, as I see it, is one of disparate sentencing between different regions of this state.
Under the United States Constitution a death penalty law must provide a meaningful basis for distinguishing the few cases in which that penalty is imposed from the many in which it is not. (Godfrey v. Georgia (1980) 446 U.S. 420, 427 [64 L.Ed.2d 398, 406, 100 S.Ct. 1759]; see Spaziano v. Florida (1984) 468 U.S. 447, 460, fn. 7 [82 L.Ed.2d 340, 352, 104 S.Ct. 3154].) California’s 1978 statute does not perform that function efficiently. Describing 19 different special circumstances which render a defendant eligible for death, it sweeps so broadly that most murderers are subject to the death penalty, and only a few excluded.
But capital trials are far more expensive than ordinary murder trials, and prosecutors in the larger, urban counties where most murders occur do not have the resources to seek the death penalty against more than a few of the eligible defendants. They must do what the statute does not: establish guidelines to distinguish those few cases in which the death penalty will be sought *276from the many in which it is not sought. Those guidelines and practices vary so greatly from county to county that we have, in effect, 58 death penalty laws, and in many cases whether a defendant gets the death penalty will depend on where he committed the crime.
Under the guidelines established in most of the urban counties the murder in the present case would not have been prosecuted as a capital case. Unfortunately for defendant, he committed his crime in a rural county where murders are less frequent, and in which it is possible for the prosecutor to seek a death penalty in all or most death-eligible cases. No doubt the prosecutor acted within his authority in seeking the death penalty. But when we compare this case to the pattern of murder cases from the urban counties of this state, the imposition of the death penalty here seems an aberrant result.