Court Opinion

ID: 9692198
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-25 15:46:40.564039+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T18:19:33.031723
License: Public Domain

ABRAMSON, J.,
concurring in part and dissenting in part:
I respectfully dissent from the majority’s view, expressed in footnotes 2 and 3, that the reasonable doubt instruction set forth at § 12.08 of Kentucky Instructions to Juries, Criminal should no longer be given. Although KRS 532.025 does not require that the propriety of death be found beyond a reasonable doubt, I believe that an instruction to that effect is consistent with the Kentucky capital sentencing scheme. KRS 532.025(2) requires that the fact finder “shall consider ... any mitigating circumstances or aggravating circumstances otherwise authorized by law and any of the following statutory aggravating or mitigating circumstances which may be supported by the evidence_” This direction of the jury’s deliberations in a capital sentencing phase as to the finding and weighing of aggravating and mitigating circumstances and the indisputable proposition that “death is different,” in my opinion, render it appropriate to direct the jury to find the propriety of death beyond a reasonable doubt before that sentence may be imposed. Even if that particular instruction is omitted, however, I believe that the death penalty “acquittal” concept enunciated by Justice O’Connor in both Rumsey, 467 U.S. at 211, 104 S.Ct. 2305 and in Sattazahn, 537 U.S. at 117, 123 S.Ct. 732, would still apply to bar the prosecutor’s second attempt at securing the death penalty where the first jury chooses something less than death as the appropriate sentence.
VENTERS, J., joins.