Richards v. Brown

Summary

The Oregon Court of Appeals affirmed the denial of Louise May Richards’s petition for post-conviction relief following her second-degree murder conviction. The court held that ORS 136.450 (2019) required at least 10 jurors to concur in rejecting her extreme emotional disturbance affirmative defense. However, the court concluded that trial counsel was not constitutionally deficient because the concurrence issue was unsettled and the challenged procedure was routinely used at the time of trial.

Holdings

1. ORS 136.450 (2019), which required a criminal-jury verdict to be supported by concurrence of at least 10 of 12 jurors, required at least 10 jurors to concur that the defendant had not proved the extreme-emotional-disturbance affirmative defense before the jury could return a valid general guilty verdict for second-degree murder.
2. Richards failed to prove that trial counsel's failure to raise the concurrence argument constituted constitutionally inadequate assistance because, at the time of trial, the legal issue was unsettled and the argument was not so clearly established that every attorney exercising reasonable professional skill and judgment necessarily would have raised it.

Questions Presented

1. Whether ORS 136.450 (2019) required at least 10 of 12 jurors to concur in rejecting an extreme-emotional-disturbance affirmative defense.
2. Whether trial counsel rendered constitutionally inadequate assistance by failing to request an appropriate concurrence instruction, object to the instructions, or object to the 9-3 rejection of the defense.
3. Whether the post-conviction court properly denied relief despite its erroneous conclusion that no minimum concurrence requirement applied to rejection of the defense.

Disposition

affirmed