Court Opinion

ID: 9727864
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-26 13:51:22.801083+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T18:25:43.698474
License: Public Domain

McDERMOTT, Justice,
concurring1 and dissenting.
The General Assembly has specified ten aggravating circumstances that may be weighed against mitigating circumstances by a jury considering the death penalty. See 42 Pa.C.S. § 9711(d)(1) et seq. Eight of them do not require a prior conviction or a “significant history” of felony convictions. They speak directly to the immediate current conviction and support the penalty in and of themselves, if they are properly proved and weighed against mitigating circumstances.
Section 92 makes a “significant history of felony convictions” an aggravating circumstance. It does not specify when that history begins nor does it exclude the conviction the jury has rendered in the case before them.
Prescinding from an obvious rationale for the inclusion of the immediate conviction as an aggravating circumstance, the majority again retreats into the daedal grammar of Goins.3 Stuck on the plural use of “convictions” in section 9, the majority closes their eyes to what becomes the *542absurd consequences of refusing to count the immediate conviction.
There is no reason why the immediate conviction, as the second in the defendant’s career ought not be counted. The legislature did not say that a significant history of prior convictions was required. They said that a “significant history of felony convictions” was the aggravation. They significantly did not exclude the immediate conviction as a counter in that history; nor, indeed, should it be discounted. The consequences of disregarding the immediate conviction are literally astounding.
While it is true that section 104 would authorize the consideration of a first and second degree murder conviction committed before or at the time of the immediate offense as aggravation, a homicide of lesser degree or a crippling, blinding criminal act is, per the majority, on the house. Perhaps nothing so well points the moral as Mr. Justice Hutchinson’s concurring opinion in Commonwealth v. Goins, 508 Pa. 270, 495 A.2d 527 (1985), where upholding his present view, he said, “In short, this appellant [Goins] has shown that he is prone to kill under certain particular circumstances, but has not done so often enough to meet the legislative definition of “significant history.” Id., 508 Pa. at 285, 495 A.2d at 534. Mr. Justice Hutchinson went further in Goins, supra, when he said, “and two or more unrelated prior violent felonies may constitute a history which satisfies § 9711(D)(9).” Id., 508 Pa. at 286, 495 A.2d at 535. At least therefore, one violent felony is still a bargain. The insistence by the majority that a “significant history of felony convictions” requires more than one violent felony prior to the immediate conviction for murder, is the triumph of willful grammarians over the hectatombs of criminal deaths and the living deaths inflicted on this society by criminals who have not yet killed “often enough”.
For instance, a single previous robbery, where the victim was rendered into parapelegia, because the robber, doubtless lacking the experience required by the majority, failed *543to kill his victim, only counts for one. The blinding of a police officer in his last outing, counts for one; so too, the maiming a house wife, while gaining experience in gun point rape, or in a previous essay into violence, the defendant only succeeded in crippling and disfiguring, because his inexperienced hand shook while using his new switch blade. Some of these and a myriad of examples, would not count as aggravation, nor supply a “significant history” even in the face of the present conviction for murder. The General Assembly did not specify the number of prior convictions required for a “significant” history because significance transcends one or any given number of particular offenses.
LARSEN and PAPADAKOS, JJ., join in this opinion.

. I join in the decision to affirm the conviction.

. 42 Pa.C.S. § 9711(d)(9).

. Commonwealth v. Goins, 508 Pa. 270, 495 A.2d 527 (1985).

. 42 Pa.C.S. § 9711(d)(10).