Summary
A U.S. Supreme Court case reversing a decision by the Kansas Supreme Court that had thrown out a standard instruction for juries in capital cases. The Carr brothers engaged in a crime spree that started with a carjacking and battery, continued with another robbery and murder, and culminated in a horrible crime of home invasion robbery, sadistic sex crimes, and the cold-blooded murder of five of the victims and attempted murder of the sixth. In the separate Gleason case, Gleason committed a robbery and then murdered an accomplice and her boyfriend to keep them quiet. The juries in both cases were instructed, correctly under Kansas law, that aggravating circumstances had to be proved beyond a reasonable doubt, but they were not instructed on any burden of proof for mitigating circumstances submitted to them by the defendants. The Kansas Supreme Court, in an exercise in strained logic, decided that the jury might assume that the mitigating circumstances also had to be proved beyond a reasonable doubt if not expressly told otherwise. CJLF joined the case to argue that the instructions were proper. The National District Attorneys Association and the California District Attorneys Association joined the brief. The United States Supreme Court agreed by an 8-1 vote and reversed the decision, reinstating the death sentences.
