People v. Anderson
landmark case in the U.S. state of California
The People of the State of California v. Robert Page Anderson, 493 P.2d 880, 6 Cal. 3d 628 (Cal. 1972), was a landmark case in the state of California that outlawed capital punishment for nine months until the enactment of a constitutional amendment reinstating it, Proposition 17.
Background
The case was an automatic appeal to the court under section 1239b of the California Penal Code, which provides that, following a death sentence, the case is automatically appealed to the State Supreme Court.
Robert Page Anderson was convicted of first-degree murder, attempted murder of three men, and first-degree robbery. The Supreme Court affirmed the judgment of the lower court in People v. Anderson 64 Cal.2d 633 [51 Cal.Rptr. 238, 414 P.2d 366] (1966), but it reversed its decision with respect to the sentence of the death penalty In re Anderson, 69 Cal.2d 613 (1968) following the landmark case Witherspoon v. Illinois (1968), which decided that it was illegal to remove a juror who simply disagreed with the death penalty unless the juror adamantly refused to follow the law under any circumstances.
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This entry incorporates text from “People v. Anderson” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.