State v. Carr
| Docket Number | 90,044 |
| Decision Date | 21 January 2022 |
| Parties | State of Kansas, Appellee, v. Reginald Dexter Carr Jr., Appellant. |
| Court | Kansas Supreme Court |
SYLLABUS BY THE COURT
1. Whether a statute is constitutional is a question of law.
2. Section 1 of the Kansas Constitution Bill of Rights states "All men are possessed of equal and inalienable natural rights, among which are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness." The rights guaranteed under section 1 are judicially enforceable against governmental action that does not meet constitutional standards.
3. The court applies a two-part framework to determine whether an asserted right or declared interest under section 1 of the Kansas Constitution Bill of Rights is judicially enforceable. First, the court determines whether the asserted right or declared interest is included within the guarantees or protections of section 1. Under this step, the court begins by carefully describing the asserted right. Then, it determines whether that asserted right or declared interest is protected under section 1 by looking to the language of the Kansas Constitution. When the words themselves do not make the drafters' intent clear, courts look to the historical record, remembering the polestar is the intention of the makers and adopters. If the asserted right or declared interest is established under section 1, the court proceeds to the second part of the framework-exploring whether the governmental action impairs the right and, if so, whether such governmental action satisfies constitutional scrutiny.
4. The historical record reflects the framers did not intend the term "inalienable" in section 1 of the Kansas Constitution Bill of Rights to be construed as "absolute" and "nonforfeitable." Instead a careful reading of section 1, coupled with the transcripts of the convention debate, demonstrates that the term "inalienable" refers only to one's ability to transfer his or her right or interest to another person. Though inalienable, the framers viewed the natural rights guaranteed within this section to be forfeitable in civil society. So construed, the framers did not intend for section 1 to impede or limit the State's authority to punish individuals for their criminal conduct.
5. Section 1 of the Kansas Constitution Bill of Rights acknowledges a person's inalienable right to life, but that right is not absolute or nonforfeitable. Once a defendant has been convicted of capital murder beyond reasonable doubt, the defendant forfeits his or her natural rights under section 1 () and the state may impose punishment for that crime pursuant to the provisions of Kansas' capital sentencing scheme.
6. Once a defendant has been lawfully convicted of capital murder the imposition of a capital sentence does not implicate section 1. However, other constitutional guarantees, including those contained in sections 9 and 10 of the Kansas Constitution Bill of Rights, continue to regulate the state's authority to punish and guard against arbitrary applications of such authority.
7. Section 5 of the Kansas Constitution Bill of Rights, which provides that "[t]he right of trial by jury shall be inviolate," preserves the jury trial right as it historically existed at common law when our state's Constitution came into existence.
8. In ascertaining the meaning of a constitutional provision, the primary duty of the courts is to look to the intention of the makers and adopters of that provision. A constitutional provision is not to be narrowly or technically construed, but its language should be interpreted to mean what the words imply to persons of common understanding.
9. As used in section 5 of the Kansas Constitution Bill of Rights, the term "jury" denotes a legally selected group of persons sworn to determine issues of fact and return a decision based on the evidence and in accordance with the law as instructed.
10. The process of death qualification under K.S.A. 22-3410 removes only those prospective jurors who are excluded from the constitutional definition of a "jury," and therefore neither the statute nor the process of death qualifying the jury implicate any right protected under section 5 of the Kansas Constitution Bill of Rights.
11. Section 5 of the Kansas Constitution Bill of Rights does not require that juror qualification or selection standards enacted by the Legislature be affirmatively authorized by the common law. Rather, that provision merely preserves the right to jury trial as it existed at common law when the Kansas Constitution was adopted.
12. When reviewing the legal propriety of penalty phase instructions addressing mitigating circumstances, the court must consider whether the instructions, considered together as a whole, fairly and accurately state the applicable law, and whether a jury could have been misled into not considering certain mitigating circumstances that, by law, should have been considered.
13. K.S.A. 21-4624(e), now codified as K.S.A. 2020 Supp. 21-6617(e), does not require a jury to be instructed on the burden of proof for mitigating circumstances in the penalty phase of capital sentencing proceedings, overturning the holding in State v. Cheever, 306 Kan. 760, Syl. ¶ 5, 402 P.3d 1126 (2017).
14. Under the law of the case doctrine, when a second appeal is brought to this court in the same case, the first decision is the settled law of the case on all questions involved in the first appeal, and reconsideration will not normally be given to such questions.
15. State law error during the penalty phase of a capital murder trial may be deemed harmless where the party benefitting from the error shows there is no reasonable probability the error affected the jury's ultimate conclusion regarding the death sentence verdict.
16. The avoidance-of-arrest statutory aggravating circumstance, K.S.A. 2020 Supp. 21-6624(e), effectively channels the discretion of the sentencer and is not facially overbroad.
17. In Kansas capital sentencing proceedings, the Confrontation Clause in the Sixth Amendment to the United States Constitution applies only to testimonial hearsay relevant to the jury's eligibility decision, i.e., evidence relevant to the existence of one or more statutory aggravating circumstances. A defendant's confrontation rights do not extend to, and are not implicated by, testimonial hearsay offered to impeach or rebut defendant's mitigation witnesses.
18. An expert's reliance on testimonial hearsay does not constitute a violation of the Confrontation Clause in the Sixth Amendment to the United States Constitution per se. Instead, the controlling question is whether the expert is testifying as a witness in his or her own right or testifying as a mere "conduit" for the testimonial hearsay. The Confrontation Clause forecloses the expert's opinion testimony only in the latter situation. The problem of expert-as-conduit is not the amplification of multiple experts' opinions but the fact that the so-called expert is not actually giving expert testimony.
19. Under the facts of the case, the State's expert witness was not a mere conduit for the opinions of others and thus his testimony did not violate the Confrontation Clause in the Sixth Amendment to the United States Constitution; although the expert witness vaguely asserted that other experts agreed with him, he offered an independent opinion and interpretation of PET (positron emission tomography) scans based on his own synthesis of the evidence.
20. During the penalty phase of a capital murder trial, any error that arises solely under state law may be deemed harmless if the court is persuaded there is no reasonable probability the error affected the jury's ultimate conclusion regarding the weight of the aggravating and mitigating circumstances, i.e., the death sentence verdict.
21. The court applies a four-step analysis to review jury instruction challenges. It first considers the reviewability of the issue, which is then followed by reviewing whether the instruction was legally and factually appropriate. If the court concludes there is error, it then turns to reversibility. Where a death penalty defendant fails to request or object to an instruction, the court applies the clearly erroneous standard of review and determines whether it is firmly convinced that the jury would have reached a different verdict had the instruction error not occurred.
22. Under the facts of the case, the jury instructions and verdict forms, viewed together as a whole, made clear that "the crime" referenced in the aggravating circumstances instruction was capital murder.
23. Under the facts of the case, the jury instruction describing the verdict forms, which improperly used a double negative in the grammatical structure of the sentence describing the statutory weighing equation under Kansas' capital sentencing scheme, was not clearly erroneous because the error was not readily noticeable and the jury's use of Verdict Form 1 on all counts indicated that jurors employed the proper statutory weighing equation and determined beyond reasonable doubt that aggravating circumstances existed and outweighed mitigating circumstances, thereby warranting a sentence of death.
24. The district court's failure to instruct the jury that it must find the defendant was at least 18 years old at the time of the offense, as a condition precedent to imposing the death penalty, constitutes error. But such error is subject to a harmless error analysis.
25. Under the facts of the case, the district court's failure to instruct the jury that it must find defendant was at least 18 years old at the time of the offense in order to impose capital punishment was harmless because the issue was not contested and the...
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