The Supreme Court today affirms the death sentence in People v. Frederickson for the 1996 murder of a store manager in Santa Ana.
The main issue arises from the defendant’s failed attempts to plead guilty while representing himself. Instead of contesting the crime, the defendant wanted to rely on his remorse to avoid a death sentence, and on appeal he claimed his inability to plead denied him his right to control his defense. A statute bars a guilty plea in a capital case without consent of counsel and the court’s opinion by Justice Ming Chin holds the defendant forfeited a challenge to the statute’s constitutionality by trying to plead guilty only in the municipal court, which had no authority to accept the plea, and never in the superior court. Even in death penalty cases, the court says, “Self-represented defendants are ‘held to the same standard of knowledge of law and procedure as is an attorney.’ ”
The court also concludes that the defendant was too late at trial in objecting to evidence he claimed was obtained by an unlawful warrantless search and that he didn’t make an adequate showing to overcome the “shield law” protecting a newspaper reporter’s notes the defendant wanted to access.
Justice Goodwin Liu separately concurs. He would not find the defendant’s failed-guilty-plea argument forfeited. Rather, Justice Liu would reach the merits and hold to be constitutional the statute preventing guilty pleas in capital cases without consent of counsel. He says “the record is too muddled to support” the forfeiture finding and concludes a 2018 U.S. Supreme Court case “does not upend our long and unbroken precedent holding that [the statute] constitutes a valid balance between society’s interest in ensuring the reliability of judgments in capital cases and a criminal defendant’s right to conduct his own defense.”
Justice Liu also reports a change in the Attorney General’s position. In a 2018 case, People v. Miracle (see here), the Attorney General said the need-for-consent statute was unconstitutional; in today’s case, however, Liu says the Attorney General “assured this court at oral argument that going forward he will no longer take th[at] position.” (Link added.)
