People v. Davenport

Opinion

ARABIAN, J.

This case reaches us again after a penalty phase retrial following this court’s affirmance of defendant John Galen Davenport’s 1980 first degree murder conviction (Pen. Code, §§ 187, subd. (a), 189), 1 and torture-murder special-circumstance finding (§ 190.2, subd. (a)(18)), and reversal of his death sentence based on instructional error. In reversing the penalty phase, we concluded that the penalty instructions erroneously failed to inform the jury of the standard of proof required before certain aggravating evidence could properly be considered, failed to inform the jury…