The Supreme Court today affirms the death penalty in People v. Oyler for the setting of the 2006 Esperanza wildfire that killed five firefighters. The defendant’s opening brief says this “appears to be the first case in the United States in which a defendant was sentenced to death for starting a wildland fire.”
Two justices agree with upholding the convictions in the case, but they want to reverse the sentence because of a prospective juror’s removal based on her death penalty views.
The court’s opinion by Chief Justice Patricia Guerrero rejects numerous asserted bases for reversal, including that the defendant wasn’t present at a conference regarding his retained counsel’s competence to handle a capital case, the reassignment of the case to a new trial judge, the denial of a defense motion to change venue, and numerous substantial evidence challenges. The justices are unanimous on these issues.
What they disagree about is whether the trial judge sufficiently questioned a prospective juror before dismissing her for not being able to make an unbiased determination of whether to impose the death penalty. The majority finds substantial evidence supports the juror’s excusal, while Justice Kelli Evans disagrees in a dissent joined by Justice Goodwin Liu. Justices Evans writes that the juror was impermissibly excused “because of her general views about the death penalty,” not, as required, because she wouldn’t follow the law in the defendant’s case and wouldn’t vote for the death penalty even if circumstances warranted it. Questions the dissent asserts should have been asked of the juror, the majority finds “may be helpful in certain circumstances,” but says the questions’ absence did not require reversal because “the trial court undertook an adequate inquiry in light of [the prospective juror’s] responses.”
The dissent also takes issue with the majority’s comment, “there is no required script that must be followed during voir dire.” “Perhaps there should be,” Justice Evans says, “as the majority’s opinion today leaves lower courts and litigants to guess at whether functionally equivalent questioning will be deemed sufficient [citation] or insufficient [citation], with the considerable time, expense, and anguish of a capital penalty trial hanging in the balance.”
