How has the Court interpreted the "totality" of the aggravating and mitigating circumstances in an instruction in a death penalty case?

California, United States of America


The following excerpt is from People v. Vieira, 106 P.3d 990, 25 Cal.Rptr.3d 337, 35 Cal.4th 264 (Cal. 2005):

Defendant argues that the instruction's language referring to the "totality" of the aggravating and mitigating circumstances erroneously implied that a single mitigating circumstance could not outweigh all aggravating circumstances and hence could not serve as a basis for the more lenient sentence. We have rejected that argument: "Certainly, [a reasonable] juror would not have interpreted ... language referring to the `totality' of the aggravating and mitigating circumstances in a `death oriented' fashion to `relate[ ]' solely to the `quantity ... of the factors' and not to their `quality,' or to entail `"a mere mechanical counting of factors on each side of the imaginary scale...."' ... There is no reasonable likelihood that the jury misconstrued or misapplied the challenged instruction in violation of the Eighth or Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution or any other legal provision or principle." (People v. Berryman (1993) 6 Cal.4th 1048, 1099-1100, 25 Cal.Rptr.2d 867, 864 P.2d 40, overruled on other grounds in People v. Hill (1998) 17 Cal.4th 800, 823, fn. 1, 72 Cal.Rptr.2d 656, 952 P.2d 673.)

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