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Lovell v. State11/12/1997
4. The Court further said:
"The jury's questions, and particularly the last written inquiry in reply to which the untenable 'presumption' was given, clearly indicated that the jurors were confused concerning the relation of knowingly disposing of stolen securities after their interstate journey had ended to the charge of conspiring to transport such securities. Discharge of the jury's responsibility for drawing appropriate conclusions from the testimony depended on discharge of the judge's responsibility to give the jury the required guidance by a lucid statement of the relevant legal criteria. When a jury makes explicit its difficulties a trial judge should clear them away with concrete accuracy. In any event, therefore, the trial judge had no business to be 'quite cursory' in the circumstances in which the jury here asked for supplemental instruction. But he was not even 'cursorily' accurate. He was simply wrong."
Id. at 612-13, 66 S. Ct. at 405, 90 L. Ed. at 354.
A trial court's decision not to respond at all to a question from a deliberating jury was addressed in Price v. Glosson Motor Lines, Inc., 509 F.2d 1033 (4th Cir. 1975). In that personal injury case the jury had been instructed that if it was
"'uncertain as to whether the plaintiff was guilty of contributory negligence, or if you believe that it is just as probable that the plaintiff was not guilty of any such negligence as it is that he was, then you cannot find the plaintiff guilty of contributory negligence.'"
Id. at 1035. The court declined to respond when the jury asked whether it had been instructed "'that if there be doubt in the minds of the jurors as to the negligence or lack of it on the part of the plaintiff, the jury should find for the plaintiff?'" Id. The Fourth Circuit, in reversing a judgment based on a jury verdict in favor of the defendant and remanding for a new trial, reasoned as follows:
"Concern about confusing or prejudicing the jury by over-instruction is, of course, appropriate. In the present contest, however, the concern is not compelling, because here the jury specified its difficulty and confusion concerning instructions on the central question in the case. In the absence of a jury inquiry, the district judge works in something of a vacuum; he can never be sure how well a jury has understood instruction on points of law, complex or simple. When a jury makes a specific difficulty known, however, it is far easier for the judge to be certain that he is responding to difficulties rather than compounding them. And when the difficulty involved is an issue as central to the case as contributory negligence is here, helpful response is mandatory."
Id. at 1037 (citation and footnote omitted).
In the instant matter the jury's question indicated that one or more members of the jury were concerned about the concept of youthful age as a statutory mitigating circumstance. Absent clarification from the trial court, there was a very real risk that the jurors may have erroneously concluded that youthful age is concerned exclusively with the defendant's chronological age, and Lovell was twenty-four years old at the time of the murder. Without having been told that persons younger than age eighteen at the time of the murder cannot be executed, the jury may well have considered that youthful age was listed in the statute as a mitigating factor to allow for the possibility of a life sentence in cases where the death penalty is sought against a person who was age seventeen, or age sixteen, or possibly even younger when committing the murder. The result may well have been that the jury miscalibrated on the low side the floor or minimum age at whi
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