There was only one published opinion from the Ninth Circuit and the California appellate courts yesterday, and it's this one.
In all honesty, I'm not sure that you should read it. The facts are sufficiently brutal -- the killing of a two-month old baby by his father, and the second-degree murder conviction of the mother -- that it might be too disturbing of a read for some. Moreover, unlike many opinions with gruesome facts, the opinion is all about the sufficiency of the evidence, so it's 108 pages of fairly consistent ugliness.
If you can get over that, though, it's a fairly rare California Supreme Court opinion where the justices are not only split, but where all sides make super good points. As a result, figuring out which particular group of justices you personally agree with is potentially a challenge, but an important one. Whichever way you come out, I suspect you'll care about the result.
Justice Evans authors the majority opinion and holds that the evidence was insufficient to convict the mother of second degree murder. Justice Liu writes a concurring opinion that discusses at some length why gender stereotypes about mothers could (and does) lead to a disproportionate number of them (as opposed to fathers) being prosecuted and convicted of failure to protect a child. Whereas Chief Justice Guerrero authors a dissent, arguing that the evidence against the mother was sufficient to support the conviction for second degree murder.
I'm honestly not sure which position I agree with most. This is, in my view, an exceptionally tough case. On the one hand, I have no doubt that the mother didn't want her baby murdered, and had she known for sure that the father was going to kill him, would have done something. On the other hand, there were an incredibly large number of events that a jury could reasonably find indicated a severe risk of harm to the infant: the father threatening to kill the baby even before his birth, the father's prior abuse of the child, his prior jabbing with the screwdriver at the mother's stomach while she was pregnant, the mother's efforts to protect the father after the murder, etc.
Tough. Super tough.
