The Supreme Court on Monday affirmed the convictions of the two capital defendants in People v. Bertsch and Hronis, but reversed the death penalty for one of them by retroactively applying “changes in the law governing a defendant’s competency to represent himself at trial.” Both defendants had received death sentences for a 1985 murder-kidnapping-rape.
The court’s unanimous 201-page opinion by Chief Justice Patricia Guerrero held that, as to defendant Hronis, “due to intervening changes in law that altered the governing standard for self-representation by certain defendants suffering from mental illness, allowing Hronis to represent himself at the penalty stage constituted prejudicial error.” The changes that occurred after Hronis’s trial were the U.S. Supreme Court decision in Indiana v. Edwards (2008) 554 U.S. 164 and the California Supreme Court opinion in People v. Johnson (2012) 53 Cal.4th 519, which concluded that even defendants found competent to stand trial (as was Hronis) could, as stated in Edwards, “still suffer from severe mental illness to the point where they are not competent to conduct trial proceedings by themselves.”
Hronis’s death sentence was reversed because, the court concluded, even though he was ruled competent to stand trial, the superior court “did not consider whether Hronis met the higher standard of competence to represent himself that the high court allowed in Edwards.”
As in many death penalty appeals, the defendants made numerous arguments the court found unavailing. These included that the defendants should have had separate guilt trials instead of a single trial with separate juries, that Hronis’s competency-to-stand-trial proceedings were flawed and his right to a speedy trial was violated, that the superior court erred in ruling on various for-cause juror challenges, that certain DNA evidence was improperly admitted (certain testimony was found erroneously, but not prejudicially, admitted), and that lots of jury instructions — or failures to instruct — were erroneous.
