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dog days of summer edition

By Karl R. Keys, Esq.

This week’s edition is up and available. Leading off this week is the Alabama Court of Criminal Appeal’s decision in Mark Dwyatt Brown v. State.  The issue in Brown is the difference, under state law, between capital murder and felony-murder. The “trial court did not adequately inform the jury that Brown could not be convicted of capital murder unless it determined that he had the specific, particularized intent to kill.” The trial court’s instruction permitted, rather, “the jury to find Brown guilty of the capital offenses, even if he did not have the particularized intent to kill, as long as one of his codefendants had the particularized intent to kill.” This error was compounded when the prosecution, in closing arguments...continue to full post

Full post as published by Capital Defense Weekly on August 10, 2010 (boomark / email).