Coming Together: the California Supreme Court 2015-2016

• Jurisdiction: California,United States
• Citation: Vol. 29 No. 3
• Publication year: 2016
• Author: By Gerald F. Uelmen
• topic: Constitutional Law,Criminal Law

Coming Together: The California Supreme Court 2015-2016

By Gerald F. Uelmen

With the "new majority" in place, the fiscal year ending June 30, 2016 delivered lots of surprises at the California Supreme Court. Most surprising has been the high level of agreement among nearly all of the justices. A more liberal bloc is firmly in control, consisting of Justices Werdegar, Liu, Cuéllar and Kruger.

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They shared the lowest dissent rates of the year, and were in full agreement with each other in 95 percent of the published decisions. [See Table II.] When the Court split, however, most often it was by a 5-2 vote, with either Chief Justice Cantil-Sakauye or Justice Carol Corrigan siding with the liberals. Thus, Justice Ming Chin has emerged as the most frequent dissenter, racking up the highest dissent rate at 13 percent, compared to his 2.7 percent for the previous year. The overall rate of dissenting votes for all 77 published decisions this year was 4.76 percent, down from the previous year's 5.14 percent. There was only one 4-3 split, in People v. Prunty (2015) 62 Cal.4th 59, where the majority opinion by Justice Cuéllar threw out a street gang enhancement sentence imposed under the Street Terrorism and Enforcement Act of 1988 for insufficiency of evidence, drawing dissents from Cantil-Sakauye, Corrigan and Chin.

There were eight 5-2 decisions, five of them with majority opinions authored by Justice Liu. Justice Chin dissented in six of them, while the Chief Justice and Justice Corrigan each dissented in three. In People v. Sandoval (2015) 62 Cal.4th 394, one of only two of this year's death penalty cases to draw a dissent, Justice Liu authored an opinion upholding the death sentence, but vacating a special circumstance finding of "lying in wait." Another special circumstance of killing a police officer in the performance of his duties was upheld. Justices Chin and Corrigan objected to striking the "lying in wait" special circumstance. The only other death affirmance to draw a dissent was People v. Nguyen (2015) 61 Cal.4th 1015, in which Justice Cuéllar authored a solo dissent to Justice Liu's majority opinion, arguing that the evidence was insufficient to uphold a conviction of aiding and abetting an attempted murder. The Court decided 21 death penalty appeals this year, upholding the death sentences in all but one of them. The only reversal came in People v. Becerra (2016) 63 Cal.4th 511, a unanimous ruling authored by Justice Corrigan, finding the trial court violated the defendant's right to self-representation under Faretta v. California (1975) 422 U.S. 806.

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In Gaines v. Fidelity Nat'l Title Ins. Co. (2016) 62 Cal.4th 1081, Justices Liu and Kruger dissented from a five-justice majority opinion by Justice Corrigan holding that a partial stay of proceedings did not toll the requirement of Code of Civil Procedure section 583.310 that an action be brought to trial within five years after the action is commenced against the defendant. And in DeSaulles v. Community Hospital of the Monterey Peninsula (2016) 62 Cal.4th 1140, a five-justice ruling authored by Justice Liu, the Court held that as long as a settlement agreement involves a payment of money from defendants to plaintiff, no matter how small in relation to the plaintiff's demand, the plaintiff is a "prevailing party" under Code of Civil Procedure section 1032, subdivision (a)(4), and entitled to an award of costs as a matter of law. Justices Kruger and Werdegar dissented.

This was one of only two cases in which Justice Kruger parted company with Justice Liu. The other was in B.H. v. County of San Bernardino (2016) 62 Cal.4th 168, a 6-1 ruling authored by Justice Chin, in which the Court reversed the Court of Appeal's determination that the Child Abuse and Neglect Reporting Act did not impose a mandatory duty on the Sheriff's Department to cross-report child abuse allegations to the relevant child welfare agency when it received a 911 report of suspected child abuse, while upholding a determination that the investigating Sheriff's Deputy had no duty to cross-report her investigative findings of no abuse. Justice Liu would have held the Sheriff's Deputy did have such a duty, but his dissent was solo.

Best of the Year

Far and away, I thought the best majority opinion was the last decision of the year, the masterful opinion for a unanimous court by Justice Carol Corrigan in People v. Sanchez (2016) 63 Cal.4th 665. Twelve years ago, led by Justice Antonin Scalia, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Crawford v. Washington (2004) 541 U.S. 36 that the admission of testimonial hearsay against a criminal defendant violates the Sixth Amendment right to confront and cross-examine witnesses. In nearly every term since then, a divided Court has struggled to define the meaning of "testimonial" hearsay. For lower courts — and for law professors teaching Evidence, like me — it has been a frustrating and confusing journey.

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The low point came with the 2012 ruling in Williams v. Illinois (2012) 132 S.Ct. 2221, a rape prosecution in which the identity of the attacker was disputed. At trial, a prosecution expert testified that she compared the defendant's known profile to a profile of the alleged perpetrator...