Summary
California Supreme Court case in which a convicted murderer asks the court to overturn 40 years of settled precedent regarding how juries decide whether to sentence a murderer to death, a change which could overturn every sentence of every murderer currently on death row. McDaniel was a gang member who embarked on a revenge hit to kill a person who had stolen drugs from a member of McDaniel’s gang. Three other people happened to be in the apartment with the suspected thief. McDaniel and his accomplice broke in and shot all four of them. Two died. and two were permanently disabled. California’s structured process for deciding whether a murderer will be sentenced to death includes several steps. The murderer must be convicted of first-degree murder. At least one special circumstance in addition must be found. The jury must consider a wide variety of aggravating and mitigating circumstances. Finally, the jury must decide if the aggravating outweighs the mitigating and if death is the appropriate punishment. From the beginning, the law has been understood to require that the jury must be unanimous as to degree, special circumstances, and the ultimate penalty, and further that degree and special circumstances must be proved beyond a reasonable doubt. McDaniel’s lawyers now ask the Supreme Court to declare that the jury must also be unanimous as to what aggravating factors have been proved, ignoring any that even one juror disputes, find them proved beyond a reasonable doubt, and find that the final penalty decision “proved” beyond a reasonable doubt. These claims have been considered and rejected dozens of times by the same court in the past, but now the court has asked for briefing on them. CJLF’s brief explains that neither the history nor the text of the California Constitution or the relevant statutes supports such a disruptive change. The Supreme Court unanimously agreed. The opinion's analysis largely tracks CJLF's argument, and our brief is expressly cited for one point.
