The Supreme Court today upholds a death sentence in People v. Choyce for three rapes and murders committed between 1988 and 1997. A defense psychiatrist testified the defendant suffered from the mental disorder of sexual sadism because of abuse he experienced during childhood.
The court’s unanimous opinion by Justice Kelli Evans, at 52 pages, is one of the shorter decisions you’ll see in a capital appeal. It rejects numerous contentions of reversible error, including several asserted improper failures to give jury instructions (one argument was the jurors should have been told that sexual intercourse with a dead body is not rape) and claims of prosecutorial misconduct in questioning the defense psychiatrist (like “asking whether [she] was the ‘one to go to’ when a capital defendant wished to ‘blame it on the parents’ ”).
