I wasn’t able to fit into last week’s recap all the notable actions at the Supreme Court’s Wednesday conference. Here’s a bit more.
More dissenting votes: juvenile de facto LWOP resentencing
Justices Goodwin Liu and Kelli Evans recorded dissenting votes from the denial of review in People v. Wooten. In an unpublished opinion, the Fourth District, Division Two, Court of Appeal affirmed the denial of a resentencing petition by a defendant who was sentenced to life with the possibility of parole, with a minimum term of 32 years, for attempted murder committed when he was 15.
This case is similar to People v. Sutton, which was written up in last week’s recap. As in Sutton, the defendant in Wooten sought relief under Penal Code section 1170, which generally permits resentencing of some defendants who were sentenced to life without parole for crimes committed when they were minors, and under the Fourth District, Division One, decision in People v. Heard (2022) 83 Cal.App.5th 608, which held that, consistent with equal protection principles, resentencing must also be allowed for those sentenced to the “functional equivalent of life without parole.”
In Wooten, Division Two held the defendant’s sentence was not functionally equivalent to an LWOP sentence. It also rejected an argument section 1170 violates equal protection because it allows offenders convicted of offenses more serious than attempted murder (e.g., first degree murder) to seek resentencing after serving 15 years while Wooten must serve 25 years before being eligible for a youthful offender parole hearing. The appellate court’s opinion stated, “The Legislature had a rational basis to provide a means to convert LWOP terms for juvenile offenders to indeterminate sentences, and to deny resentencing for offenders who already had indeterminate sentences.”
In June, the Supreme Court granted review in People v. Munoz to decide whether a juvenile homicide offender sentenced to 50 years to life in prison is entitled to recall and resentencing under section 1170(d)(1), on the ground that the sentence is the functional equivalent of life imprisonment without parole. (See here; see also here.)
The court’s denial of review in Wooten (and in Sutton) is “without prejudice to any relief to which defendant might be entitled after this court decides . . . Munoz.”
Review denied: prosecution of district attorney’s special advisor
The court denied review in Teran v. Superior Court. The published opinion of the Second District, Division Five, ended the criminal prosecution by the Attorney General of a lawyer who was working for the Los Angeles County District Attorney as a special advisor in a unit that collects evidence about law enforcement personnel that must be disclosed to defendants under Brady v. Maryland (1963) 373 U.S. 83. The lawyer used in the DA’s office publicly available information about officer disciplinary proceedings that she had learned during her earlier employment with the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department.
The Attorney General claimed the lawyer violated Penal Code section 502(c)(2), which makes it unlawful to “[k]nowingly access[ ] and without permission . . . make[ ] use of any data from a computer, computer system, or computer network.” Division Five concluded, “the Legislature never intended this statute — which is principally aimed at computer hacking and tampering — to be used to criminally prosecute disclosure of purely public information that happened to be stored on a computer,” nor did “the Legislature intend[ ] to allow for criminal prosecution of an individual who shares a public court document just because the document had been stored as data on, and then retrieved by the individual from, [the Sheriff’s computer system].”
