The Supreme Court yesterday denied review in Baker v. Superior Court, but six justices filed a concurring statement warning a superior court against limiting defendants’ ability to seek resentencing on a judge’s own motion.
Penal Code section 1172.1 allows a court “on its own motion . . . [to] recall the sentence and commitment previously ordered and resentence the defendant in the same manner as if they had not previously been sentenced.” A court can do so on the “recommendation” of various entities, such as a district attorney or the secretary or the Board of Parole Hearings, but the statute says “[a] defendant is not entitled to file a petition seeking relief from the court under this section. If a defendant requests consideration for relief under this section, the court is not required to respond.”
According to the separate statement, authored by Justice Kelli Evans and signed by the rest of the court except for Chief Justice Patricia Guerrero, the writ petition in the case complained “that the San Mateo County Superior Court enacted, as an invalid local rule, a ‘policy’ of blanket denials of defendant-initiated section 1172.1 petitions.”
Denial of review was appropriate, the six justices said, because “[t]he record here is, at best, ambiguous that respondent court adopted a policy that interfered with sentencing judges’ authority to grant such relief on their own motion.”
But the superior court did not get off completely free. The statement goes on to say, “to the extent the superior court established a policy simply not to review any Penal Code section 1172.1 petitions at all, such policy would contravene legislative mandates.” The justices said, “Defendants, although not expressly permitted to initiate recall and resentencing themselves, may nonetheless be able to ‘invite’ the court to exercise its discretionary powers,” and they concluded, “any policy that would interfere with a sitting sentencing judge’s ability to receive notice of, or to act upon, a defendant-initiated invitation to recall and resentence under section 1172.1, subdivision (a)(1) would raise significant concerns.”
The separate statement provides the view of a super majority of the Supreme Court about a legal issue. However, because the Court of Appeal (the First District, Division Four) summarily denied the writ petition and thus didn’t issue any opinion in the case, it’s unclear how available that statement will be to the bench and bar. (See here.)
