The trial court and the Court of Appeal thought the case should come out one way. The California Supreme Court unanimously reversed.
I particularly liked the last several pages of Justice Kruger's opinion. They independently explain the issue well, as well as why the case should come out the way it does:
"The narrow interpretation of Penal Code section 490.2 as
applied to section 10851 convictions would mean that a person
who intends only to take the vehicle temporarily may be
punished as a felon, while a person who also intends to take the
vehicle permanently is subject only to misdemeanor
punishment. The utter illogic of this result effectively
eliminates the narrow interpretation of Penal Code section
490.2 as a possible construction. As in other instances when a statute “blindly and literally applied” would lead to “obvious
injustice and a perversion of the legislative purpose” (People v.
Oliver (1961) 55 Cal.2d 761, 766), we must instead choose a
reasonable interpretation that avoids absurd consequences that
could not possibly have been intended. [Cites] . . . .
When voters enacted
Penal Code section 490.2, they could not possibly have intended
thereby to split the atom of the section 10851 vehicle taking into
two separate crimes—permanent taking and the included
offense of temporary taking—with the latter punished more
harshly than the former. . . . If anything, to exclude a section
10851 conviction based on the taking of a low-value vehicle
because the defendant’s intent was not culpable enough would
contravene Proposition 47’s overarching purpose of reducing the
punishment for low-level nonviolent property crimes. More to the point, we see no plausible reason why any
reasonable voter or legislator might have intended such a result. . . .
The
Attorney General argues that even though a person who violates
section 10851 by committing what he calls a “pure taking” of a
vehicle is eligible for Proposition 47 relief, a person who actually
drives the vehicle at any point is not. The Attorney General
illustrates the point with an example from the now-defunct
MTV series Punk’d, in which a prankster towed the celebrity
victim’s car as part of an “elaborate hoax.” As the Attorney General sees it, the MTV prankster who has arranged for towing
services has committed a misdemeanor (assuming the car is of
the requisite low value); for virtually anyone else, the crime
remains punishable as a felony.
The Attorney General’s theory appears to rest on the
premise that for purposes of section 10851, taking and driving a
vehicle are mutually exclusive categories of conduct. This
manner of parsing the section 10851 offense is contrary to both
experience—which tells us that cars are commonly taken by
driving them away—and our unsurprising observation in Page
that “vehicle theft often involves driving the vehicle.” (Page,
supra, 3 Cal.5th at p. 1188.) . . . . The distinction between taking a
vehicle by driving it away and taking a vehicle by other means
is not one that has ever had any significance under section
10851, and the Attorney General offers no sound basis for
believing Proposition 47 was intended to distinguish among
vehicle takings on this basis.
Our holding today does not mean that Proposition 47,
properly read, necessarily covers every offense that one might
believe to be less serious than petty theft or simple drug
possession. We are not at liberty to rewrite the initiative to enact our own view of provisions that might have improved it,
or that would have better vindicated its stated purpose of
reducing punishment for low-level crimes, and we do not do so
here. (See People v. Martinez (2018) 4 Cal.5th 647, 653–655.)
Nor should our holding be taken to suggest that the term “theft,”
in general, carries anything other than its settled meaning.
Our holding today is narrow, and specific to the
interaction between Proposition 47 and the section 10851
offense. We hold only that to interpret Proposition 47 to split
the section 10851 taking offense into two offenses—
misdemeanor taking with intent to permanently deprive the
owner of the vehicle, and felony taking with intent to do so only
temporarily—is so patently illogical that we cannot imagine any
plausible reason why voters might have intended that result.
The elements of taking an automobile without the intent to
permanently deprive the owner of its possession are included in
taking with such intent. . . .
It certainly would have made our task easier had voters
expressly instructed that all vehicle takings under section 10851
are to be treated as equivalent to vehicle theft for purposes of
Proposition 47’s theft-reduction provision. But Proposition 47
does not speak in this degree of granular detail, so we must
discern the voters’ intent given the other tools at hand.
Confronted with comparable circumstances, we have not
hesitated “to find by implication provisions in a statute which are not within the scope of the statutory language taken
literally.” (Bruce v. Gregory, supra, 65 Cal.2d at p. 674; see also
In re Michele D. (2002) 29 Cal.4th 600, 606 [that legislators “may
not have considered every factual permutation” for statute’s
application does not mean application to particular conduct is
beyond legislative intent].) It is, after all, “our role to make
sense rather than nonsense out of the corpus juris.” (West
Virginia Univ. Hospitals, Inc. v. Casey (1991) 499 U.S. 83, 101.)
The narrow interpretation of Penal Code section 490.2, as both
sides agree, is one that would make nonsense of the law. We
therefore agree with the parties that it is an interpretation we
must reject."
Well said.
