James T. Clark, Jr. v. Commonwealth of Virginia

Summary

The Supreme Court of Virginia affirmed James T. Clark, Jr.'s conviction of capital murder for hire and his death sentence for the 1978 contract killing of George Harold Scarborough. The court held that the trial court properly excluded a veniremember whose opposition to capital punishment amounted to an irrevocable commitment against it, admitted Clark's confession as voluntary, found the corpus delicti sufficiently proved, and correctly refused lesser-included-offense instructions. It sustained Virginia's capital sentencing scheme against constitutional attack, holding that the jury need not be instructed that a mitigation finding need not be unanimous and need not specify which aggravating factor it found, and that the failure to define the aggravating terms sua sponte was not reversible error. On mandatory proportionality review, the court found the sentence neither excessive nor disproportionate — including in comparison with codefendant Stewart's commuted sentence — and no abuse of discretion in the prosecutor's decision to commute Stewart's sentence in exchange for his testimony.