The Supreme Court today addresses two issues concerning resentencing provisions in the Three Strikes Reform Act of 2012, which was adopted by the voters’ approval of Proposition 36. The court also affirms a death sentence. Both opinions are unanimous, although why there is total agreement in the death penalty case is a bit mysterious.
The Reform Act changed the Three Strikes law so that no longer do all third felony convictions automatically require a minimum 25-years-to-life sentence; that sentence is now limited mostly to those third felonies that are “serious” or “violent.” The Reform Act also provides that prisoners previously sentenced under the old Three Strikes law for many non-serious and non-violent third-strike felonies can petition for resentencing. In the consolidated opinion deciding People v. Johnson and People v. Machado, Chief Justice Tani Cantil-Sakauye writes for the court that Machado can be resentenced but Johnson can’t.
Machado had two third strikes; he was convicted at the same time of both a serious felony and a felony that was neither serious nor violent. Affirming Division One of the Second District Court of Appeal, the Supreme Court holds that he can seek resentencing for the non-serious, non-violent felony, which could lead to an earlier parole. Johnson’s third strike was a felony that was neither serious nor violent when he committed it, but, in between the commission of the crime and the enactment of the Reform Act, the felony was re-classified as serious and violent. Affirming Division Three of the Second District Court of Appeal, the court concludes it’s the classification of the crime at the time the Reform Act took effect that counts.
Johnson’s and Machado’s cases both involved ambiguous language in the Reform Act. The opinion resolving the cases is a smorgasbord for statutory construction mavens.
Justice Kathryn Werdegar’s opinion in People v. Cunningham affirms the death penalty for a triple murderer. The guilt phase of the case was a bench trial; only the penalty phase was to tried to a jury. One argument rejected by the court was that defendant was coerced into waiving a jury trial for the guilt phase because of what the defendant called his “painful, excessive, and unnecessary shackling” during pretrial proceedings.
Cunningham also involves some jury selection issues that have been on the court’s radar recently.
Earlier this week, the court reversed a death sentence in People v. Leon because the trial court had erroneously dismissed jurors for cause based on their asserted inability to be impartial jurors in a capital case. Today, the court addresses the same issue, but finds no error in a juror’s dismissal for cause.
The court also concludes there was no Batson violation in the prosecution’s peremptory dismissal of several African-American jurors, even though the trial court had erred in its legal analysis of the defendant’s claim as to one excused juror. How to evaluate claims of racial discrimination in the jury selection process is an issue that has divided the court before, but not today.
Interestingly, however, it seems like the Batson issue could have divided the court today. The court finds nothing wrong with one peremptory challenge because, even though the prosecutor had actually stated his reasons for the challenge, the court is able to “discern at least one race-neutral reason . . . that is ‘apparent from and “clearly established” in the record.’ ” As precedent for this method of rejecting a Batson claim, the court relies on its opinion last month in People v. Scott. But that very analytic method — discerning a race-neutral reason for a peremptory challenge despite the prosecutor having in fact stated reasons — appears to have been the target of a critical concurring opinion by Justices Goodwin Liu and Leondra Kruger in Scott itself. Today, there are no separate opinions.
