041337P.pdf   11/07/2005  United States  v.  Wesley Ira Purkey
   U.S. Court of Appeals Case No:  04-1337
   Western District of Missouri   
   [PUBLISHED] [Arnold, Author, with McMillian and Colloton, Circuit Judges]
   Criminal case - criminal law. Defendant's kidnaping, rape and murder
   convictions and his sentence of death affirmed. Defendant's multiple
   confessions were not obtained by false promises and were properly
   admitted into evidence; prison's destruction of defendant's notes of his
   conversations with the interrogating officers did not deny him fair trial as
   he had no trouble remembering the details of the interrogations and his
   testimony was comparable evidence; claims that the government was
   precluded from seeking the death penalty -either by indictment clause of
   the Fifth Amendment or because the Federal Death Penalty Act is
   unconstitutional - rejected; challenges to district court's for-cause
   exclusion of three potential witnesses who expressed reluctance to
   impose the death penalty rejected; claims that the district court erred in
   refusing to allow certain evidence in the guilt phase of the trial rejected;
   kidnaping instruction were not erroneous; claim of prosecutorial
   misconduct (reference to defendant's Nazi tattoos) rejected, as the
   comments were brief, the evidence of guilt was powerful and the district
   court took prompt curative action; any errors in evidentiary rulings during
   the penalty phase were harmless, either individually or cumulatively;
   defendant had no right to make a statement to the jury during the penalty
   phase without being subject to cross-examination; while the court erred in
   permitting the government to introduce duplicative aggravators, the
   process the jury goes through in weighing the aggravating and mitigating
   factors is not a mechanical one, and the error did not render the death
   sentence invalid; the Federal Death Penalty Act does not require the jury
   to return special findings regarding the existence of mitigating factors,
   and the fact that the jury did not return such a form is entirely proper and
   the court did not err in accepting the jury's verdict form; claim that the
   prosecutor engaged in misconduct when he asked a defense witness on
   cross-examination whether he was aware that defendant had threatened to
   harm the prosecutor the previous day rejected.