I gotta give props to Justice Kelety. When this opinion was initially published last week, I thought: "Whoa. I understand Part II, but I'm seriously thinking deeply about Part III. Was the evidence really insufficient to sustain defendant's conviction? The guy nearly hit a cop car, drove like a bat out of hell at 60 to 100 mph (!) in a 35 mph zone for over a mile while evading a marked police car with its siren and lights on while driving on the wrong side of the road and nearly hitting other vehicles, and then crashes his car into a brick wall. The officers totally recognize the defendant as the one driving the vehicle during the pursuit, but when they get to the crashed car, he's nowhere to be found. They so testify at trial. Is that really insufficient evidence as a matter of law that the guy in fact committed a hit and run, which is what the Court of Appeal in fact held? Seems to me like the guy obviously fled."
So I thought about saying something like that, but then life got in the way, I got busy, other things happened, the whole "Biblical Flood in Southern California" thing went down, etc. etc.
Today, Justice Kelety decides to not publish Part III, even after originally not publishing the entire thing, then deciding to publish the whole opinion, and then splitting the middle to take out (IMHO) the part that totally had me wondering.
I mean, I get her point: the police didn't testify about how long it took them to respond to the collision, or why exactly Mr. Jimenez was nowhere to be found after the crash. They definitely (probably) should have.
But, I mean, come on. The guy was crazy evading the police. It's obvious (to me, anyway) that after trying out outrun 'em, and then crashing his car, he ditched the thing in one last effort to get away. Is it theoretically possible that it took the police, like, an hour to get to the car after it crashed, or that the guy really wanted to call the police and report his crash but, shucks, was just too concussed or confused to do so? Maybe. I guess. But I'd bet my left foot that the police got there really quickly after chasing the guy at 100 mph for a little over a mile, and even if the guy testified that he intended to call in the accident (which he didn't), I'd bet my entire set of feet on the fact that he wasn't telling the truth and that he deliberately fled in a (continuing) attempt to get away.
But, hey, at this point, Part III is unpublished, and -- as I noticed at the time -- the guy's sentence on Count 2 (the one reversed by the Court of Appeal) was stayed anyway. So not like it really matters at this point. To anyone.
Problem solved.
(Though I still do wonder if the Court of Appeal is really right on this one. Which I'd care more about if it mattered, which, again, it doesn't much at this point.)
