State of Arizona, Appellee v. Shawn Patrick Lynch, Appellant

Summary

The court affirmed Lynch’s convictions and noncapital sentences but remanded for a new penalty-phase proceeding because the jury was improperly instructed to treat the three prongs of the (F)(6) aggravator as three separate aggravating circumstances rather than one. The court rejected Lynch’s challenges to competency, jury selection, evidentiary rulings, lesser-offense instructions, Tison findings, prosecutorial conduct, and the sufficiency and retrial of the aggravators. The court held that the instructional error was not harmless and that independent reweighing was unavailable because the error concerned the penalty-phase instruction, not an erroneous aggravation finding.