States Get More Leeway in Death Penalty Ruling

The Supreme Court today gave state prosecutors greater leeway in what they tell juries choosing life or death for convicted murderers, voting 5 to 4 to uphold a California man’s death sentence.

But the court also voted 6 to 3 to set aside a North Carolina murderer’s death sentence as it reaffirmed a decision making it easier for capital case jurors to consider all “mitigating evidence.”

And in a 5-4 ruling in an Oklahoma case, the justices said that telling juries to ignore sympathy when sentencing a person to die does not violate the Constitution.

The decision in the North Carolina case probably will not affect any Death Row inmate outside the state, and the two other rulings are not likely to affect many of about 2,200 Death Row inmates across the nation.

The court’s decision in the California death penalty case is a defeat for Richard Boyde, who was convicted and sentenced to die for the Jan. 15, 1981, murder of Dick Gibson, a Riverside convenience store clerk.

Police said Boyde, then 24, was accompanied by his 19-year-old nephew, Carl Ellison, when abducting Gibson during a robbery that netted $33 in cash. Gibson was taken to a nearby orange grove and shot.

Ellison also was convicted, and was sentenced to 25 years to life in prison.

The jury that sentenced Boyde was read a list of specific mitigating factors that it could consider in choosing his punishment. Jurors were also told that they could consider “any other circumstance which extenuates the gravity of the crime even though it is not a legal excuse for the crime.”

Boyde’s lawyers argued that the instruction prevented jurors from considering factors regarding his background and character that might have been found to be mitigating even if they did not lessen the gravity of the crime itself.

The jury was also told that it was required to impose a death sentence if it found that aggravating factors outweighed mitigating factors. Boyde’s lawyers said the mandatory language prevented sentencing jurors from considering his case as a whole.

The California Supreme Court decided by a 4-3 vote in 1988 that Boyde had not been harmed by the challenged instructions.

Neither instruction is still used in California, however.

In upholding the state court ruling today, Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist wrote, “There is not a reasonable likelihood that the jurors in (Boyde’s) case understood the challenged instructions to preclude considerations of relevant mitigating evidence.”

In the North Carolina case, the court set aside the death sentence of Dock McKoy Jr., convicted of the Dec. 22, 1984, shooting death of Anson County Deputy Sheriff William Kress Horne.

Relying on its 1988 ruling in a Maryland case, the high court said the jury that sentenced McKoy wrongly was limited in its consideration of mitigating factors because jurors were told that they had to agree unanimously on the existence of each mitigating factor.

“Essentially, the system that was condemned is the system we’ve been using since 1977 for sentencing people to death,” said Raleigh lawyer Malcolm R. Hunter Jr., who represented the Death Row inmate involved in today’s decision.

All 85 of the state’s current death row inmates were sentenced since 1977.

“It could have a very broad impact” in North Carolina, Hunter said of today’s decision.