State of Arizona, Appellee v. Robert Joe Moody, Appellant

Summary

The Arizona Supreme Court, sitting en banc, rejected Robert Joe Moody's challenges to his 2001 retrial convictions for the 1993 murders of Michelle Malone and Patricia Magda, holding that double jeopardy did not bar retrial after his first convictions were reversed for deprivation of counsel, that the indictment need not be dismissed because false grand jury statements were immaterial and thus not perjurious, and that a series of unpreserved trial claims rose at most to non-fundamental error. The court upheld the competency findings, refused to suppress non-testimonial physical evidence taken after a denied request for counsel, found no intrusion into the attorney-client relationship, approved death qualification and the for-cause removal of four 'extreme' venire members, and rejected challenges to voir dire, expert testimony, a late-disclosure sanction, evidentiary rulings, limits on cross-examination of a reporter witness, and five instances of claimed prosecutorial misconduct. The majority's sentencing analysis and formal disposition paragraph fall in the truncated portion of the text, but Chief Justice Jones's separate opinion confirms the judgment affirmed the convictions and remanded for resentencing, with the majority applying harmless-error analysis to the trial judge's findings on statutory aggravating circumstances made without a jury. Jones, C.J., concurring in part and dissenting in part, would have remanded solely on the Sixth Amendment jury-trial ground without harmless-error review.