In People v. Juarez, the Supreme Court today enforces a statute that generally bars a felony charge from being dismissed and refiled more than once. The unanimous opinion by Justice Ming Chin holds that the People’s two dismissals of attempted murder charges against the defendants barred a subsequent prosecution for a different crime — conspiracy to commit murder — based on the same underlying facts. The court concludes that, if the rule were otherwise, “[o]nly the prosecution’s creativity and the size of the Penal Code and penal provisions in other codes would limit the number of possible filings.”
The opinion reverses the Court of Appeal, Fourth District, Division Three, which had felt its “hands [were] tied” by a 2009 Supreme Court decision. The Supreme Court today says that the Court of Appeal “read too much into” the prior opinion.
