The Supreme Court today affirms the death sentence in People v. Penunuri for the murders of three people, including a potential witness to the two other murders. The court’s 6-1 opinion by Justice Goodwin Liu, among many other things, finds a number of evidentiary and instructional errors occurred at trial, but concludes they were all harmless, singularly and cumulatively.
The question of prejudice from one error in particular prompts a dissent. The majority accepts the Attorney General’s concession that it was error to have the jury hear testimony about statements made to the police by an accomplice of the defendant (the accomplice didn’t testify at trial, invoking his Fifth Amendment rights). But, the majority finds, the error — and two other pieces of erroneously admitted hearsay evidence — “added little if anything to the properly admitted evidence against Penunuri.”
Justice Mariano-Florentino Cuéllar, however, claims that admitting the accomplice’s hearsay statements was not harmless and should cause reversal of the death sentence, although not the murder convictions. He says “[t]here is no basis for treating the mistaken admission of these statements as a minor rounding error in the evidentiary calculus.” The statements were evidence that the defendant himself committed — and did not just aid and abet — the first two murders and, Justice Cuéllar asserts, “[i]n practice, juries are less willing to vote for death when the defendant’s role involved aiding and abetting the commission of a murder by another.”
