This opinion certainly meets the criteria for (admittedly belated) publication.
In 2002, a then-15 years old gets convicted of (alongside his 18-year old accomplice) "robb[ing] the victim and her boyfriend, kidnapp[ing] the victim at gunpoint, and t[aking] turns raping her." He gets sentenced to 50 years in prison.
In 2024, the defendant (Jarvis Garner) petitions to be resentenced on the ground that his 50-year sentence is equivalent to life without parole (LWOP) since "the average age of death for a California inmate is 54 years" and, in any event, the average life expectancy of a Black Californian is 74.6 years. So, he says, his sentence is functionally equivalent to life in prison forever.
The California Attorney General . . . agrees.
Even though the trial court denied the petition, on appeal, the California Attorney General confesses error and says that, yes, the sentence here equivalent to LWOP.
The Court of Appeal is not particularly thrilled with that concession. It allows the District Attorney of San Joaquin County -- the party that opposed the petition in the trial court -- to appear as amicus curiae and oppose the grant of relief.
The panel ends up agreeing with the San Joaquin DA and rejects the Attorney General's concession.
The sentence is not equivalent to LWOP, the Court of Appeal holds, because (1) the panel refuses to accept the statistical evidence since the trial court didn't make a factual finding about it (weak sauce, in my view, but perhaps doctrinally accurate), and (2) even if all that's true, under current law, Mr. Garner is eligible for a parole hearing after 15 years in prison, so it's not LWOP, since he has a chance to potentially get out.
Most interesting to me is the fact that the California Attorney General conceded the point. (Second most interesting is that the Court of Appeal rejects that concession.) The concession may tell you something about the general approach of the current California Attorney General (Rob Bonta) -- one with which different people might stridently agree or disagree.
