Resolving an intra-district conflict, the Supreme Court in People v. Cofer today caps the amount of custody credits that a defendant can claim when sentenced to concurrent terms at a single hearing under a plea agreement resolving several different cases. The court interprets Penal Code section 2900.5(b), which provides that presentence credit “shall be given only where the custody to be credited is attributable to proceedings related to the same conduct for which the defendant has been convicted.”
In the case before the court, the issue was how much presentence credit the defendant was entitled to in five separate criminal cases that were resolved at a single sentencing hearing.
The court’s unanimous opinion by Chief Justice Guerrero says “ ‘proceedings’ . . . contemplat[es] a single case — meaning that custody credits under the statute can be awarded in a particular case only when the custody time involved is attributable to that case.” Thus, the defendant gets “credits in each case for the time defendant spent in custody in that matter, rather than awarding him credit in each case for time served in other cases.”
The court reverses the Sixth District’s 2-1 published opinion, which had disagreed with that district’s earlier decision in People v. Jacobs (2013) 220 Cal.App.4th 67. (See here.) It also disapproves the Second District, Division Six, opinion in People v. Kunath (2012) 203 Cal.App.4th 906. There was no petition for review in Kunath.
