finding "no doubt" that evidence of 16-year-old boy's turbulent family history, beatings, and severe emotional disturbance should have been given weight as mitigation evidence because "[o]ur history is replete with laws and judicial recognition that minors, especially in their earlier years, generally are less mature and responsible than adults"
How later courts described this case
- finding "no doubt" that evidence of 16-year-old boy's turbulent family history, beatings, and severe emotional disturbance should have been given weight as mitigation evidence because "[o]ur history is replete with laws and judicial recognition that minors, especially in their earlier years, generally are less mature and responsible than adults"
- recognizing that "there can be no doubt that evidence of a turbulent family history, of beatings by a harsh father, and of severe emotional disturbance is particularly relevant" as mitigating evidence in a capital case when the defendant was 16 years old at the time of the offense
- finding that the trial judge’s refusal to consider evidence about the defendant’s troubled childhood, particularly because he committed the crime at age sixteen, violated the rule articulated in Lockett because a sen-tencer cannot refuse to consider relevant mitigating evidence
- holding that the sentencer may not be “precluded from considering, as a mitigating factor, any aspect of a defendant’s character or record and any of the circumstances of the offense that the defendant proffers as a basis for a sentence less than death”
Written by the judges who cited it.
Later courts went against this
Disagreed with by State v. Cooey, 46 Ohio St. 3d 20 (1989)
But we reject the notion that Eddings bars us from assigning it the weight we think proper.
Distinguished
Distinguished by Songer v. Wainwright, 571 F. Supp. 1384 (1983)
U.S. 104, 102 S.Ct. 869, 71 L.Ed.2d 1 (1982), is inapposite.
The opinion
Justice Brennan,
concurring.
I join the Court’s opinion without, however, departing from my view that the death penalty is in all circumstances cruel and unusual punishment prohibited by the Eighth and Fourteenth Amendments, Gregg v. Georgia, 428 U. S. 153, 227 (1976) (dissenting opinion).