FRANK X. HOPKINS Petitioner v. RANDOLPH K. REEVES (524 U.S. 88)
U.S. Supreme Court · decided June 8, 1998 · Supreme Court Database (Spaeth)
- Citation
- 524 U.S. 88 · 118 S. Ct. 1895
- Decided
- June 8, 1998
- Term
- October Term 1997
- Vote
- 8–1
- Majority author
- Justice Thomas
- Issue area
- Criminal Procedure
- Disposition
- Reversed
- Outcome
- Petitioning party won
- Ideological direction
- Conservative
Opinion excerpt
Justice Thomas delivered the opinion of the Court. In Beck v. Alabama, 447 U. S. 625 (1980), we held unconstitutional a state statute that prohibited lesser included offense instructions in capital eases, when lesser included offenses to the charged crime existed under state law and such instructions were generally given in noncapital cases. In this ease, we consider whether Beck requires state trial courts to instruct juries on offenses that are not lesser included offenses of the charged crime under state law. We conclude that such instructions are not constitutionally required, and we therefore reverse the contrary judgment of the Court of Appeals. I In the early morning hours of March 29, 1980, police received an emergency call from the Religious Society of Friends meetinghouse in Lincoln, Nebraska. Responding to the call, they found Janet Mesner, the live-in caretaker, lying on the floor in the rear of the house with seven stab wounds in her chest. When an officer asked who had stabbed her, Mesner gave respondent’s name. The officers then went to an upstairs bedroom and found the partially clad dead body of 'Victoria Lamm, a friend of Mesner who had been visiting the meetinghouse. She had been stabbed twice, the first blow penetrating the main pulmonary artery of her heart and the second her liver. A billfold containing respondent’s identification was lying near Lamm’s…
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