Justices Hear State Death Penalty Issue

An attorney for California asked the Supreme Court Tuesday to reinstate a key part of the state’s death penalty law, arguing that the 1978 statute seeks only to have jurors avoid “gut reactions” in deciding whether a murderer gets death or a life term in prison.

Last December, the California Supreme Court voided the death sentence imposed on the killer of a 15-year-old Riverside girl because jurors had been told to “not be swayed by mere sentiment, conjecture, sympathy, passion (or) prejudice.” On a 5-2 vote, the court concluded that this “anti-sympathy instruction” had biased the jurors against the murderer.

‘Emotion Has No Place’

However, Deputy Atty. Gen. Jay M. Bloom told the justices: “What this (instruction) tells the jury is to put aside your emotions and consider the facts of the case. Emotion has no place when you are imposing a death sentence.”

But a lawyer representing the murderer, Albert Greenwood Brown Jr., argued that convicted killers can hope for nothing other than sympathy from the jury.

“This says that any feeling of leniency is totally unacceptable,” said Monica Knox, a public defender from San Francisco. “We can’t constitutionally eliminate compassion.”

California has 169 prisoners on Death Row, Pete Wilkinson, a state deputy attorney general, said.

Sees Convictions Voided

“My guess is that well over 100” of those inmates’ convictions will be voided if the Supreme Court upholds the state high court decision, Wilkinson said. “This is the standard instruction given to juries” under the 1978 death penalty law, he added.

In October, 1980, Brown, who was on parole for another rape conviction, raped and killed Susan Jordan near her Riverside home and later called the girl’s mother to tell her that she would never see her daughter alive again. Brown was convicted of murder with special circumstances and in February, 1982, was sentenced to death. In a decision written by Justice Joseph R. Grodin, the state Supreme Court upheld the conviction but reversed the death sentence.

During the hourlong argument Tuesday, the conservative justices on the U.S. Supreme Court showed little patience with the liberal ruling by the state high court.

“The whole thrust in the capital cases has been to eliminate irrationality . . . to put aside emotional decisions. What’s wrong with that?” Justice Antonin Scalia asked.

A decision in the case (California vs. Brown, 85-1563) is expected by July.

Big Sur Mining Case

In another California case, argued earlier, the justices had appeared closely divided on whether the state could intervene to set environmental rules for a strip-mining project on federal land along the Big Sur coast.

Linus Masouredis, an attorney for California, said that the state “does not seek to prohibit all mining” on federal forest lands but “seeks only to apply the environmental controls in the Coastal Act.”

But Barbara Banke, a lawyer representing the Granite Rock Co., said that the state should work with the U.S. Forest Service to set such controls, rather than act independently. She suggested that state officials must try to persuade the Forest Service to regulate the mining project. “The federal government would have the last word,” she said.

The proposed strip mining for limestone on Mt. Pico Blanco, about 25 miles south of Carmel, has been held up pending the outcome of the case (California Coastal Commission vs. Granite Rock Co., 85-1200).