Justice Yegan begins this afternoon's opinion in a fairly dramatic fashion, saying:
"“The fabric of the law will stretch only so far before it will unravel.” (People v. Martin (2018) 26 Cal.App.5th 825, 828.) Appellant seeks to stretch the newly enacted reduced murder penalties to his case. It just will not stretch and the fabric unravels. Leniency for a person who orders his cohorts to murder a 15-year-old child with a machine gun? The child is dead and our answer is, no."
One reason he might write in such a style is due to the nature of the crime, as it's not surprising that the cold-blooded murder of a teenager might get one's blood boiling. Another reason may perhaps be because it's a high profile case, and involves a petition filed by Jesse James Hollywood and the underlying murder subsequently made into the film Alpha Dog. So maybe Justice Yegan thinks -- entirely accurately -- that this opinion will be read (or quoted) more than the run-of-the-mill appellate opinion, so wants to add some spice.
It's not my cup of tea, honestly. Yeah, it's a brutal crime, and we're rightly horrified by it. But I'm fairly confident that the whole "Rule of Law" thing -- a not insignificant principle -- means that you follow the rule of law regardless of your emotional reaction to the underlying offense. So starting off an opinion by saying that you're not going to be "lenient" because a child is dead is not really how I'd frame the legal analysis of a case by the Court of Appeal. It sends a message of retribution rather than a dispassionate application of legal principles.
It's not that Justice Yegan doesn't have a point. He is confident -- from the movie or otherwise -- that the petitioner here doesn't deserve relief under the Legislature's newly-enacted resentencing provisions. And I'm pretty darn confident that he's right (though I haven't seen the movie or read the underlying opinions). It seems like Mr. Hollywood did, in fact, have an intent to kill, which, if true, negates relief under the statute.
Here's the problem, though: Mr. Hollywood says that he didn't have that intent, and files a petition that so avers.
That's probably untrue. We have a way of finding those things out: under the resentencing scheme, it's called an "evidentiary hearing." The issue on appeal is whether he's entitled to one.
Justice Yegan says that Mr. Hollywood's a liar, and we already know the truth, so we don't have to provide him with a hearing. In another colloquial passage at the end of the opinion, he says: "Checking a box on a printed form saying the petitioner could not presently be convicted of murder, given the record of conviction, is ridiculous."
Okay. I bet that's true. I bet the affirmation on the petition is wrong. Because, among other things, the trial judge below was the one who decided the petition for resentencing, and I'm confident that he very distinctly recalls the facts of this extraordinarily high profile case.
Nonetheless, to me, this smacks of "We all know you're guilty, so let's just dispense with the trial." We have procedures for things like this. At stage one, the petitioner says he's eligible for relief. At this stage the only thing we look at is the record of conviction to see if it categorically precludes relief. We don't engage in factfinding. That's for stage two. Kinda the same way we have an indictment and then let the case go to trial if the indictment is sufficient. We don't skip that second part just because the evidence of the crime is overwhelming.
Justice Cody makes some of these points -- more subtly -- in her concurrence. She says, seemingly accurately, that the petition here can be denied in a straightforward fashion, because the record of conviction for aiding and abetting murder requires an intent to kill. Which makes even more unnecessary than usual the holding here that trial judges are allowed to engage in factfinding at the initial petition stage, since you can achieve the same result without recourse to a "special exception" involving dead teenagers in high-profile cases.
It's quite possible I'm old fashioned here. I'm not a big "bloodlust" type, particularly in the Court of Appeal. I'm quite fine with Mr. Hollywood's resentencing petition being denied. But I'm also entirely okay with giving him a hearing if one's required, regardless of his underling offense. That, to me, is what it means to be committed to the rule of law.
Which, again, is No Small Thing.
