Court Opinion

ID: 9785233
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-30 21:11:25.272224+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T07:36:12.870990
License: Public Domain

Justice SAYLOR,
concurring and dissenting.
The majority concludes that Appellant waived any objection to the court’s refusal to instruct the jury regarding the extreme-mental-disturbance mitigating circumstance.1 See Majority Opinion, at 279, 18 A.3d at 1137. The majority then expresses, in dictum, its view that the General Assembly did not intend this mitigator to encompass fear, but only mental-health mitigation. Notably, since there is no basis in subsection (e)(2)’s text for such a limited interpretation, the majority’s expression is in tension with generally-accepted principles of statutory construction. See Commonwealth v. Shafer, 414 Pa. 613, 621, 202 A.2d 308, 312 (1964) (clarifying that it is improper for this Court to supply omissions in the legislative text, even if the perceived omission may have resulted from inadvertence or lack of foresight by the Legislature). It is also arguably at odds with the United States Supreme Court’s general disapproval of limitations on the range of available mitigation. See, e.g., Eddings v. Oklahoma, 455 U.S. 104,114— 115, 102 S.Ct. 869, 876-877, 71 L.Ed.2d 1 (1982); Penry v. Lynaugh, 492 U.S. 302, 319, 109 S.Ct. 2934, 2947, 106 L.Ed.2d 256 (1989); Lockett v. Ohio, 438 U.S. 586, 604, 98 S.Ct. 2954, 2964, 57 L.Ed.2d 973 (1978) (plurality).
I have previously observed that an unduly broad construction of the aggravating circumstances in Pennsylvania’s death penalty statute may render it vulnerable to constitutional attack. See Commonwealth v. Mitchell, 588 Pa. 19, 84, 902 A.2d 430, 469 (2006) (Saylor, J., concurring). The same logically applies to any unnecessarily narrow construction of the enactment’s mitigating circumstances. I find the majority’s interpretation here to be unnecessarily narrow because, as noted, there is no support in the statutory text for it. Thus, *282while I concur in the result reached by the majority based on waiver, I dissent from the implication that the (e)(2) circumstance is confined to mental-health mitigation.
Justice TODD joins this Concurring and Dissenting Opinion.

. 42 Pa.C.S. § 9711(e)(2) ("The defendant was under the influence of extreme mental or emotional disturbance.").