The Supreme Court today affirmed the death penalty in People v. Scully for the 1995 murder and robbery of a Sonoma County deputy sheriff.

The court’s unanimous opinion by Chief Justice Tani Cantil-Sakauye rejects defendant’s argument that, because of the crime’s notoriety, the superior court should have moved the trial away from the county where the murder took place.  After reviewing 68 newspaper articles in the record, the court concludes “the publicity . . . was not so inflammatory as to preclude a fair trial.”  The opinion also finds unavailing defendant’s complaint that the press treated him as an outsider — “although defendant was not from Sonoma County, as a white male he was not an outsider ‘in any ethnic, racial, or gender sense.’ ”

The court did not buy defendant’s other appellate arguments, either, including that the trial court improperly dismissed a prospective juror for not being able to return a death verdict and that it erroneously admitted evidence of prior armed robberies the defendant committed and of the defendant’s refusal to participate in a lineup.

As it has repeatedly done (e.g., here), the court brushed aside a challenge to some of its death sentence jurisprudence, saying,”we have held that the federal Constitution does not require that the penalty phase jury make unanimous findings ‘regarding the existence of particular aggravating factors’ [citations], or ‘findings beyond a reasonable doubt as to the existence of aggravating factors other than section 190.3, factors (b) and (c) [citation].’ ”  This despite signaling in the pending McDaniel appeal that it will reconsider those rules.  (See also herehere, here, and here.)  McDaniel will be argued next week.