The Supreme Court today unanimously affirms the death penalty in People v. Garton for the 1998 contract killing of defendant’s pregnant wife. Not that it matters to the death sentence, but the court also reverses a conviction for conspiracy to kill the husband of a former high school girlfriend. The reversal was by a 4-3 vote.
The court’s opinion by Justice Goodwin Liu — for himself and Chief Justice Tani Cantil-Sakauye and Justices Carol Corrigan and Leondra Kruger — rejects numerous challenges to the murder conviction and death penalty, including the claim that the superior court wrongly denied defendant the right to wear his wedding ring during the trial. The court also concludes — as it did last week in another death penalty case — that any error in admitting hearsay evidence from an autopsy report was harmless beyond a reasonable doubt.
The court’s division on the conspiracy conviction concerns whether there was sufficient evidence of an overt act to attempt murder of the former girlfriend’s husband. (Actually, the question in this case — under a rule that changed after the defendant was charged — is whether there was an overt act in California for the murder that was supposed to occur in Oregon.) The majority says there wasn’t, but the 26-page dissenting opinion — by Justice Ming Chin for himself and Justice Mariano-Florentino Cuéllar and pro tem Justice Charles Poochigian — believes otherwise. It’s a fact-specific dispute, as Justice Chin states, “the majority and I generally agree on the governing legal principles.”
