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3775
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MARVIN MANDEL, Governor
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requirement in every case, permitted the sentencing
authority to be guided by and to focus on an "objective
consideration of the particularized circumstances of the
individual offense and the individual offender before it
can impose a sentence of death." Jurek v. Texas, 96 S.
Ct. at 2957.
The broad, mandatory death penalty statutes of North
Carolina, Louisiana and Oklahoma were found by the
Supreme Court to have failed to meet the constitutional
test. Woodson v. North Carolina, 96 S. Ct. 2978 (1976) ;
Roberts v. Louisiana, 96 S. Ct. 3001 (1976), and Green v.
Oklahoma, Mem., 96 S. Ct. 3216 (1976). The principal
shortcoming of these statutes lay in their failure to
provide "... the fundamental respect for humanity
underlying the Eighth Amendment,... [which] requires
consideration of the character and record of the
individual offender and the circumstances of the
particular offense as a constitutionally indispensible
part of the process of inflicting the penalty of death."
Woodson v. North Carolina, 96 S. Ct. at 2991. The fatal
flaw in these statutes was that none required
particularized consideration of mitigating circumstances
and that they therefore failed to provide objective
standards to guide, regularize and make rationally
reviewable the process of imposing the death sentence.
These considerations were of paramount importance in
the review of the presently existing Maryland death
penalty statute conducted by the Court of Appeals of
Maryland in its opinion delivered on November 9, 1976, in
Blackwell v. State, 278 Md. 466 (1976) (Murphy, C.J.),
cert. den., ____ U.S. ___(May 16, 1977). The Court of
Appeals found the mandatory death penalty provisions of
Art. 27, §413, Md. Code Ann., unconstitutional, inasmuch
as that statute did not contain any clear or precise
guidelines enabling the sentencing authority to focus
upon and consider particularized mitigating factors. In
our argument in the Blackwell case, we were constrained
to conclude reluctantly that the Maryland statute fell
short of the Supreme Court guidelines, a conclusion which
the Court of Appeals adopted.
The following portion of the discussion of this
aspect in Blackwell v. State, supra, provides an insight
into the elements of a constitutional capital sentencing
statute:
"It is true, of course, that § 413 permits
elements of mitigation to be presented to the jury,
i.e., proof of the defendant's age and of the motive
for the act in the context of resolving the question
of the proximate cause of the victim's death. Be
are unable to conclude, however, that the
presentation of these two elements requires the
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