People v. Beames Part II
Trial court did not abuse its discretion in proceeding with voir dire as means of evaluating whether murder defendant could obtain a fair trial in county, instead of granting his motion for a five week continuance so he could conduct a public opinion survey to assess how media publicity garnered by his codefendant's trial would affect his ability to receive a fair trial, where his trial had been scheduled to begin that very day and he did not refute prosecution's claim that the requested delay would cause hardship with regard to the 40 potential witnesses it had subpoenaed; court and parties had developed a juror questionnaire that took into account the recent completion of the codefendant's trial and posed questions relating to the pretrial publicity of the case; and defendant did not exhaust his peremptory challenges and did not object to the jury's final composition. Court did not err in failing to instruct jury on lesser included offenses of second degree murder and involuntary manslaughter where defense counsel told court that defense was not requesting any instructions on the lesser included charges. Any error would have been harmless where jury was properly instructed that a torture murder special circumstance requires the intent to kill and found true that special circumstance, necessarily determining that defendant intended to kill victim when he tortured her. During voir dire at penalty phase of trial, court did not err in failing to excuse six allegedly biased potential jurors for cause where defendant neither made a peremptory challenge to any of the six jurors nor exhausted his available 20 peremptory challenges; and even if he had, five of the potentials jurors did not actually serve in defendant's jury, and the remaining one, who at first candidly said she initially formed an opinion of defendant's guilt after reading a newspaper story about the codefendant's trial, later stated she would need to hear evidence to overcome her suspicion of defendant's guilt and understood that all defendants are presumed innocent until proven guilty. Court at penalty phase did not err in instructing jury regarding governor's commutation power where, though jury did not specifically ask about commutation power, it implicitly inquired about it when it asked if "life in prison without parole really mean[s] without parole forever."
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