For the time being, I remain a reluctant resident of California. Family circumstances rearranging in the coming years may inspire us to reassess things, and the Dunphy family may one day join the thousands of others who have chosen to flee the state where I was born, where my father was born, but it has become a one-party state controlled by leftists who seldom bear the consequences of their utopian schemes.
At the moment, I cling to slivers of hope that the upcoming elections will bring relief if, should God in His mercy allow it, Spencer Pratt were to defeat the famously inept Karen Bass and become mayor of Los Angeles, and Chad Bianco or Steve Hilton were chosen to succeed the oleaginously loathsome Gavin Newsom as governor. But my hopes are tempered by the knowledge that, even if such electoral miracles were to occur, the new mayor and governor would be saddled with an embedded battalion of politicians and civil servants who will make it their mission to impede whatever common sense reforms Pratt, Bianco, or Hilton might hope to bring about.
In Los Angeles, if Spencer Pratt were to become mayor, he would have to contend with a city council whose 15 members include only one who is not a Democrat, that being John Lee, a former Republican who now claims no party affiliation. Four of the others are Democratic Socialists, and the remainder might as well be. Pratt has run a spirited campaign, but no amount of clever A.I. videos will be sufficient to overcome the obstacles that bunch will shove in his way if he wins.
And in Sacramento, Democrats hold supermajorities in both the state assembly and senate, so one can expect any legislation proposed by a future Republican governor to be dead on arrival.
But even if Pratt, Bianco, or Hilton were to win, and even if they were somehow able to overcome the legislative obstructions thrown at them, they would still be stuck with the California Supreme Court, a panel more ideologically aligned to the left than even the L.A. city council or either chamber of the state legislature.
Nowhere has this alignment been more consequential than in the realm of criminal law, and a recent opinion from the Court tells me that no matter who wins the elections this year, California is doomed to further decline.
I refer to the case of People v. Morris, in which the court gutted what remained of California’s felony-murder rule, which had already been all but neutered by the state’s legislature.
Put simply, the felony-murder rule held that all participants in an inherently dangerous crime, i.e., burglary, arson, robbery, rape, or kidnapping, are culpable for murder if a victim should die as the result of only one participant’s actions. An example would be that a getaway driver waiting outside during a bank robbery could be charged with murder if a co-conspirator killed a teller.
California courts have operated under this interpretation of the law for 175 years. No longer. In their wisdom, the Supreme Court relied on the ambiguous language of a recent statute change to hold that if a defendant is to be charged with murder, he must somehow participate in the actual killing of the victim.
The facts of the Morris case are as follows: On Jan. 1, 1987, at about 11 p.m., James Stockwell and his girlfriend, referred to in court documents only as “S.F.,” arrived at Stockwell’s condominium, where they were confronted by two men, at least one of whom was armed with a gun. Stockwell was forced to lie on the floor, where Morris handcuffed him. Both men raped S.F., and Stockwell was shot in the head and killed.
Biological evidence was obtained from S.F., but such was the state of forensic science at the time that police were unable to identify a suspect, and the case went cold. Years later, the evidence was re-examined, and DNA testing identified Morris as one of the suspects. In 2013, an Orange County, Calif., jury found him guilty of first-degree murder with the special circumstances of murder for financial gain, and murder committed during the course of a robbery and rape. He was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole.
In 2019, California enacted Senate Bill 1437, which was codified under Penal Code section 189(e), which states:
A participant in the perpetration or attempted perpetration of a felony listed in subdivision (a) in which a death occurs is liable for murder only if one of the following is proven:
(1) The person was the actual killer.
(2) The person was not the actual killer, but, with the intent to kill, aided, abetted, counseled, commanded, induced, solicited, requested, or assisted the actual killer in the commission of murder in the first degree.
(3) The person was a major participant in the underlying felony and acted with reckless indifference to human life, as described in subdivision (d) of Section 190.2.
After this change in the law, Morris filed a motion for re-sentencing, which was unanimously rejected by the Fourth District of the California Court of Appeals. Enter the California Supreme Court, which reversed the lower court and ruled that Morris is eligible for re-sentencing.
There is currently a vacancy on the Court, which under the Court’s rules is filled on a case-by-case basis with justices from the Courts of Appeals. In the Morris case, the vacancy was filled by Justice Kenneth Yegan, one of the handful of remaining appellate justices appointed by a Republican governor. Justice Yegan was the lone dissent. He writes:
The judiciary does not judge the wisdom of legislation, and it is the business of the Legislature to define crime and the punishment, therefore. When the Legislature announces an unambiguous rule either superseding or modifying the felony-murder rule, I will follow it. They have not done so and the language seized upon by the majority, “interpreting” Penal Code section 189, subdivision (e)(2), is, in my opinion, a judicial stretch. There is way too much “interpretation going on here.
After further legal analysis in his dissent, Justice Yegan concludes thus:
The facts of the instant case demonstrate an uncharged conspiracy and sophisticated plan to commit, at the very least, residential burglary and armed robbery. And, appellant Richard Morris, Jr., did assist even under the new majority “interpretation” of the felony-murder rule. He helped to handcuff the victim in his bedroom before the victim was executed. It is much easier for an actual murderer to execute the victim if he is handcuffed. It appears the only reason why appellant was not in the bedroom assisting in the actual shooting, is because he was busy forcibly raping the murder victim’s girlfriend in another bedroom.
What a skunk at the picnic Justice Yegan must have been to his more enlightened colleagues, who surely couldn’t wait to be rid of him.
I wish for a shift in the political tide in California’s coming election, but it would take Moses to part the Democratic sea currently in place. Which way to the exit?
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