The Supreme Court today affirms the death sentence in People v. Pineda for the 2002 murder of one person and the 2004 jailhouse murder of a person who testified against the defendant about the first murder. The testimony was given during a prosecution that ended in a mistrial.
The court’s opinion by Chief Justice Tani Cantil-Sakauye rejects numerous arguments, including that a prospective juror was improperly dismissed because of his views about the death penalty and that the superior court erroneously allowed evidence of the defendant’s gang membership. The court assumed there were some evidentiary errors, but found them harmless.
Justice Goodwin Liu concurs separately. He repeats what he said in his concurring opinion in People v. McDaniel (2021) 12 Cal.5th 97 (see here) that U.S. Supreme Court Sixth Amendment case law “ ‘raises serious questions about the constitutionality of California’s death penalty scheme.’ ” The issue is whether a jury must be unanimous in finding at least one specific aggravating factor that supports a death penalty verdict. He says that, in this case, “Without a unanimity requirement, each juror was permitted to reach his or her own conclusion as to whether any of the ten incidents offered by the prosecutor had been satisfactorily proven to constitute prior criminal activity.” But Justice Liu concludes any error in that regard was harmless.
