Resolving a conflict in the Courts of Appeal, the Supreme Court last week held in People v. Morris that 2018 legislation narrowed the felony-murder rule to make murder liability for a nonkiller dependent on the defendant having “aided or abetted the actual killer in the lethal act itself, and not just the underlying felony.” Some appellate courts had said that nonkillers could be liable for murder if, when acting with an intent to kill, they simply aided in the underlying felony.
The ruling allows the Morris defendant another chance to have reduced his life without parole sentence for a 1987 murder.
The court’s opinion by Justice Groban was signed by five justices. Chief Justice Guerrero separately concurred and pro tem Justice Yegan dissented.
The opinion is another one involving SB 1437, legislation that limited criminal liability for felony murder and allowed for resentencing of certain defendants convicted under pre-SB 1437 law. The court issued a different SB 1437 opinion just days before Morris.
The case involves an interpretation of Penal Code section 189(e)(2), which as amended predicates murder liability on a nonkiller having “aided, abetted, counseled, commanded, induced, solicited, requested, or assisted the actual killer in the commission of murder in the first degree.” The court did not deal with (e)(3), allowing a felony-murder conviction if a nonkiller “was a major participant in the underlying felony and acted with reckless indifference to human life”; that subdivision, the court said, might defeat the defendant’s resentencing petition when the case returns to the lower courts.
The Chief Justice’s concurrence reaches the same conclusion, but differs in interpretive method. Instead of finding (e)(2) to be plain and unambiguous as the majority does, she said an opposite statutory construction is reasonable. Nonetheless, Guerrero wrote, “Applying the rule of lenity, I would adopt the interpretation more favorable to defendant in this case.”
In his dissent, pro tem Justice Yegan said that “the traditional felony-murder rule has served California well,” that the Legislature has not “announce[d] an unambiguous rule either superseding or modifying the felony-murder rule,” and that “the language seized upon by the majority, ‘interpreting’ . . . subdivision (e)(2), is, in my opinion, a judicial stretch.”
The court reversed the 2-1 published opinion by the Fourth District, Division Three, Court of Appeal. It also disapproved the 2-1 Fourth District, Division Two, opinion in People v. Lopez (2023) 88 Cal.App.5th 566; the Fourth District, Division Three, opinion in People v. Lopez (2024) 104 Cal.App.5th 616; and the Second District, Division Three, opinion in People v. Taito (2025) 115 Cal.App.5th 694.
The Supreme Court denied review in the Division Two Lopez case. The Division Three Lopez case and Taito are grant-and-holds for the Supreme Court’s Morris opinion.
