This week the Supreme Court of Washington, in State v. Gordon and State v. Bukovsky, ruled that jurors can define aggravating factors themselves when deciding stiffer punishments.
The state of Washington allows criminal juries to consider certain “aggravating sentencing factors” when deciding on the sentence for a convicted person. These are designed to give juries the option of meting out stiffer punishments for more heinous crimes. Two of these sentencing factors are known as deliberate cruelty and particular vulnerability.
Deliberate cruelty can be applied to crimes where the defendant exhibits gratuitous violence that inflicts pain as “an end in itself” and which is not normally seen in similar crimes. Particular vulnerability relates to a victim which is described as being in an obviously weak or defenseless state when the crime occurred.
So what types of acts constitute deliberate cruelty or particular vulnerability under the law? What elements must be presented to a jury in order to weigh these aggravating factors during sentencing? This week, the Washington Supreme Court issued a ruling which addressed that issue.
The court essentially ruled that juries can be instructed to consider whether deliberate cruelty or particular vulnerability exists in a given case – but that the court does not have to define those terms more precisely for jurors. The unanimous decision overturned an appellate court ruling which stated that the prosecution’s failure to define those two aggravating factors for the jurors during jury instructions resulted in a constitutional error.
In the original case, two defendants were found guilty of second degree murder in the beating death of a man. Testimony revealed that the victim was thrown to the ground and held in a headlock while being repeatedly beaten and kicked by a total of five assailants. The victim later died on the way to the hospital. The jury apparently determined that both deliberate cruelty (repeatedly kicking and punching the victim) and particular vulnerability (the victim being held in a headlock and attacked by five people) were present in the case, and the two defendants who were on trial received exceptional sentences.
The appeals court vacated the sentences (but not the convictions, which were never being challenged) due to what it called a constitutional error. But the state Supreme Court wrote that any failure to clarify the meaning of deliberate cruelty or particular vulnerability to the jury only represented an instructional error, not a constitutional one. Therefore, the resulting sentences were not unconstitutional, and the justices reversed the appellate ruling.
In a nutshell, it appears that the high court feels that aggravating sentencing factors can be viewed much like pornography was to U.S. Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart, who stated in a 1964 opinion that although he couldn’t define pornography, “I know it when I see it.” Apparently, Washington jurors don’t need to be well-versed in the legal definitions of deliberate cruelty or particular vulnerability – as long they can recognize it when they see it.