I understand that death penalty opinions by the California Supreme Court are often lengthy. Super lengthy. Lives are at stake, so a certain degree of comprehensiveness is appropriate. For that reason, the fact that today's opinion contains over 140 page of text (!) doesn't freak me out. I'll read the whole thing. It takes me a ton of time, but okay, I get it.
I also understand and appreciate that opinions like this one often read like lengthy bench memoranda. The whole structure of today's opinion -- going through each point individually, reciting defendant's argument, then reciting the prosecution's argument, then analyzing these arguments and coming up with an answer, then going to the next point and doing the exact same thing -- is something you see time and time again in cases like this. Whereas, thankfully, in a "normal" opinion you get a lot more synthesis of these analytical parts. Which in turn makes them (1) much more concise, and (2) much less of a deadly boring read.
But, again, I get it. It's a super long opinion. It's not like the justices themselves are writing the first draft. And they've got lots of other cases to think about. So, yes, the structure is undeniably plodding, and a burden. But okay. We'll deal.
What miffs me a tiny bit, however, is when opinions like that also keep the reader guessing, and make 'em plod through the whole 140 pages to get the bottom line. To be sure, Chief Justice Cantil-Sakauye tells us in the first page that the Court unanimously affirms the conviction but reverses the death sentence. But to even get a glimpse as to why you have to read, and read, and read, and read, and then finally at about page 80 (!) you stumble across your first hint as to maybe what the problem was.
The opinion is super, super long. It can afford one more paragraph at the beginning. Something like: "The trial judge made a plethora of errors that we conclude deprived defendant of a fundamentally fair penalty proceeding, including improper exclusion of a defense expert, exclusion of relevant PET scan evidence at the penalty phase, exclusion of relevant evidence about the defendant's character and good qualities, imposition of improper discovery sanctions on the defense, and repeatedly and improperly inserted himself into the trial by impermissibly demeaning counsel for the defendant in front of the jury and interjecting one-sided and nonneutral questioning of defendant's witnesses." That one sentence -- or something like it -- would at least give a hint as to what to look for. Sure, omitting it perhaps leaves the reader in suspense, which in different contexts might perhaps be exciting. But in the context of an 140+ page death penalty opinion, I'm most assuredly not in favor.
That's my comment on style. As for substance, I've only got one doctrinal point about the whole thing. Defendant gets sentenced to death for burning her house down and thereby killing four of her young children (her fifth child was also in the building but escaped the fire). A fairly horrible crime. Now, the Defendant was also in the house, and intended to die alongside her kids. You might think that in the pantheon of horrible things she's done, the fact that at least she was trying to contemporaneously kill herself as well might be one of her "better" (for lack of a superior word) decisions. Or at least a factor in mitigation.
But here, it actually gets her sentenced to death.
On page 75, the Court notes that, normally, committing arson as a way of killing someone doesn't make you death eligible; you've got to have something "else" in aggravation. Some other felonious purpose for setting the fire other than killing the individuals therein.
So what other felonious purpose does the Court find here? The bottom of page 76 gives you the Court's answer:
Suicide.
So if she'd have just set the fire to kill the kids, barring anything else, she'd get life in prison. But because she also wanted to kill herself in the fire, she's sentenced to death.
Weird, eh? You wouldn't think the law would -- or should -- work that way.
Perhaps she would have been death eligible on other grounds. But to hold that she's eligible for the death penalty because she tried to kill herself just seems totally bizarre to me.
That, anyway, is the little nugget out of the middle of an opinion that took me a couple of hours to read.
Oh, one more thing. The Chief Justice does a great job of explaining in exhaustive detail just how the trial court erred in its incredibly one-sided participation in the case. It's a fairly stunning set of facts. If you have an hour or so, definitely check it out. It starts at about page 80. The trial court definitely did things that he shouldn't have, and did not display (at all) the sort of neutrality that one hopes for -- and legitimately expects -- in any trial, and certainly in the death penalty case. Instead, you see an angry, sarcastic, and just downright mean judge who's not displaying the type of temperament at all that you want from the bench.
But the opinion doesn't mention the name of the trial judge. So I looked it up. (It's also in the bottom of the caption, at the very end of the opinion, alongside the counsel, "original proceeding" notations, etc.)
The trial judge in this case was L.A. Superior Court Judge L. Jeffrey Wiatt. Who killed himself in 2005 after being visited by the police about allegations that he had molested a child. Five years after handing out the death sentence in this case.
Not relevant at all, of course. Nor mentioned in the opinion. But interesting nonetheless.
