THE PEOPLE, Plaintiff and Respondent, v. MAURICE WALKER, Defendant and Appellant.
B319961
(Los Angeles County Super. Ct. No. BA398731)
IN THE COURT OF APPEAL OF THE STATE OF CALIFORNIA, SECOND APPELLATE DISTRICT, DIVISION TWO
Filed 12/15/22
David R. Fields, Judge
CERTIFIED FOR PARTIAL PUBLICATION*
Law Offices of Jason Szydlik and Jason Szydlik, under appointment by the Court of Appeal, for Defendant and Appellant.
*
Pursuant to California Rules of Court, rules 8.1100 and 8.1110, this opinion is certified for publication as to all parts except Part II of the Discussion.
* * * * * *
For all criminal sentencings after January 1, 2022, our Legislature in Senate Bill No. 81 (2021-2022 Reg. Sess.) (Stats. 2021, ch. 721, § 1) has provided direction on how trial courts are to exercise their discretion in deciding whether to dismiss sentencing enhancements. Specifically,
This appeal presents two questions of first impression.
First, does the mitigating circumstance that exists when there are “[m]ultiple enhancements . . . in a single case” and specifies that “all enhancements beyond a single enhancement shall be dismissed” require the court to dismiss all but one of those enhancements in every case with multiple enhancements? We conclude that the answer is “no.”
Second, what does it mean to “greatly weigh” a mitigating circumstance in deciding whether to dismiss an enhancement? We conclude that
In light of these holdings, we affirm the trial court‘s denial of the motion to dismiss the two enhancements at issue in this case. However, we reverse with directions to correct two other sentencing errors that the parties concede. We accordingly affirm in part, reverse in part, and remand with directions.
I. Facts
A. Defendant‘s criminal history
In 1983, while Maurice Walker (defendant) was a juvenile, he was adjudicated guilty of robbery. In 1992, as an adult, he was convicted of assault with a deadly weapon after he smashed a glass in his ex-girlfriend‘s face, breaking her nose and causing lacerations necessitating 100 stitches. In 1995, defendant was convicted of defrauding an innkeeper. In 2001 and again in 2007, he was convicted of felony drug possession, but successfully petitioned in 2015 to have the 2001 conviction reduced to a misdemeanor. In 2009, defendant was found guilty of a probation violation for making a criminal threat.
B. Current offense
In June 2012, defendant elbowed a woman in the mouth. When a 77-year-old man in a wheelchair tried to intervene to stop defendant‘s attack on the woman, defendant pulled out a knife and repeatedly stabbed the elderly man in the arm.
II. Procedural Background
A. Charges, conviction and initial sentence
In July 2012, the People charged defendant with (1) assault with a deadly weapon (
The trial court sentenced defendant to state prison for 20 years. Specifically, the court exercised its discretion to dismiss the 1983 juvenile adjudication as a “strike” because the court did not want to impose a “life sentence” in this case and because defendant was not convicted of any violent crimes between the 1992 conviction and the 2012 incident underlying this case. The court then imposed a 20-year sentence on the assault with a deadly weapon conviction, and imposed but stayed under
We affirmed the conviction and sentence in an unpublished opinion. (People v. Walker (Feb. 24, 2014, B245405).)
B. First resentencing
After defendant successfully petitioned to have the 2001 conviction reduced to a misdemeanor in 2015, he petitioned for a writ of habeas corpus seeking a resentencing where both one-year prior prison term enhancements would be dismissed. In 2017, the trial court dismissed the prior prison term enhancement for the 1992 assault with a deadly weapon conviction (because that conviction could not be doubly used to impose the five-year enhancement and the one-year enhancement), but refused to dismiss the prior prison term enhancement based on the now redesignated misdemeanor 2001 conviction. Defendant petitioned this court, and we issued an opinion directing the trial court to dismiss the prior prison term enhancement arising from the 2001 conviction and “to consider whether to conduct a full resentencing.” (People v. Walker (2021) 67 Cal.App.5th 198, 208.)
C. Second resentencing
After entertaining briefing, the trial court conducted a full resentencing hearing in April 2022. Defendant asked the trial court (1) to dismiss both the great bodily injury and the prior serious felony enhancements in light of the changes made to
The court then imposed a 16-year term in state prison. Specifically, the court imposed a 16-year sentence on the assault with a deadly weapon conviction comprised of a base term of six years (a middle-term three years doubled due to the prior strike), plus five years for the infliction of great bodily injury enhancement plus five years for the prior serious felony enhancement. The court imposed but stayed under
D. Appeal
Defendant filed this timely appeal.
DISCUSSION
Defendant argues that the trial court erred in (1) declining to strike the prior serious felony enhancement, (2) erred in imposing the prior serious felony enhancement twice—once for the assault with a deadly weapon count and again for the elder abuse count, and (3) erred in calculating custody credits by not calculating the time in custody between the date of his arrest and the date of his resentencing on April 8, 2022. The People concede that defendant‘s second and third arguments have merit, and we agree. (People v. Sasser (2015) 61 Cal.4th 1, 15 [prior serious felony enhancement does “not attach to particular counts but instead [is] added just once as the final step in computing the total sentence“]; People v. Buckhalter (2001) 26 Cal.4th 20, 29 [when calculating credits at a resentencing, court must calculate them up to the date of the resentencing].) As a result, we direct the trial court to impose the prior serious felony enhancement only once to defendant‘s total sentence (such that the court must not include that enhancement as part of the elder abuse sentence), and to recalculate the actual custody credits as well as conduct credits based on the time between the date of defendant‘s arrest and the date of resentencing.
As part of his first argument, the parties agree that defendant is entitled to be resentenced under the law as it exists today because his 2012 sentence was vacated. (Accord, People v. Padilla (2022) 13 Cal.5th 152, 161-162.) Under the current law,
I. Interpretation of Section 1385, as Modified by Senate Bill No. 81
As amended by Senate Bill No. 81,
“(B) Multiple enhancements are alleged in a single case. In this instance, all enhancements beyond a single enhancement shall be dismissed.
[¶] . . . [¶]
“(H) The enhancement is based on a prior conviction that is over five years old.”
(
Defendant‘s appeal requires us to confront two questions about
A. Does section 1385, subdivision (c)(2)(B), obligate trial courts to dismiss multiple enhancements in every case?3
Our task in interpreting
In our view, the text and purpose of
The text of
So what does the phrase “all enhancements beyond a single enhancement shall be dismissed” mean when considered in its statutory context? It means what it says—namely, that if a trial court determines that the mitigating circumstance of “[m]ultiple enhancements . . . in a single case” exists and that dismissal of the enhancements will not “endanger public safety,” then the court‘s discretion to dismiss is somewhat constrained by the phrase‘s mandate that the court must dismiss all but one of those multiple enhancements. This reading of the text of
Second, the purposes of
Lastly, the canons of statutory construction favor reading the phrase “all enhancements beyond a single enhancement shall be dismissed” as we have. Two canons in particular strongly disfavor adopting a construction of that phrase to mandate a rule of automatic dismissal of all but one enhancement whenever multiple enhancements are alleged. Such a construction would hinge upon reading the phrase in isolation, but the canons counsel against that. (Jarman, supra, 10 Cal.5th at p. 381.) That construction would also require us to accept that our Legislature—rather than having a standalone section that says “If there‘s more than one enhancement, automatically dismiss all but one“—instead opted to embed that mandate as an addendum to one of nine mitigating factors to be given great weight in the context of a trial court‘s discretionary decision whether to dismiss. In other words, if our Legislature was trying to implement a rule of mandatory and automatic dismissal, it picked a very circuitous way to do so. The canons generally presume that our Legislature takes the more direct route to achieve its purpose, which counsels against construing statutes to have a meaning that requires more complex linguistic gymnastics to reach. (Brodie v. Workers’ Comp. Appeals Bd. (2007) 40 Cal.4th 1313, 1328, fn. 10 [“[T]he principle of Occam‘s razor—that the simplest of competing theories should be preferred over more complex and subtle ones—is as valid juridically as it its scientifically.“].)
B. What does section 1385, subdivision (c)(2), mean when it requires trial courts to give “great weight” to mitigating factors?
Defendant urges us to ascribe even greater weight to the phrase “great weight“—namely, that the existence of a mitigating circumstance obligates the trial court to dismiss an enhancement “unless there is substantial evidence of countervailing considerations” that justify imposition of the enhancement (and the resulting longer sentence). Defendant lifts this language from People v. Martin (1986) 42 Cal.3d 437, 448 (Martin), and argues that it is dispositive of what the phrase “great weight” means in
We reject defendant‘s argument for two reasons.
First, Martin‘s construction of the term “great weight” arose in a very different context. Martin dealt with a statute that obligated the Board of Prison Terms to review every sentence to determine if it was “disparate in comparison with the sentences imposed in similar cases,” and, if the Board made a finding of disparity, obligated a trial court to give “great weight” to the Board‘s finding when determining whether to recall and resentence that defendant. (Martin, supra, 42 Cal.3d at pp. 441-445.) Because the Board‘s finding of disparity reflected the “expert judgment” of an independent tribunal and because recall and resentencing involves one trial judge effectively overruling the determination of another, Martin construed the phrase “great weight” to obligate trial courts to “accept the board‘s finding of disparity unless based upon substantial evidence it finds that the board erred in selecting the appropriate comparison group . . . .” (Id. at p. 447.) Martin‘s definition is inapt here because neither of the considerations that informed Martin‘s construction of the phrase “great weight“—the need to defer to a concordant body in another branch of government and the desire to avoid having one judge overrule another absent a finding of disparity by an independent body—is at play with
Second, it is well settled that the insertion of a postenactment letter regarding the meaning of language in
II. Abuse of Discretion
It is undisputed that two mitigating circumstances enumerated in
We conclude there was no abuse of discretion. In finding that defendant‘s earlier release from prison “would result in physical injury or other serious danger to others,” the trial court here cited defendant‘s two unprovoked and vicious attacks in 1992 and 2012—the first involving carving up his female victim‘s face with cut glass and the second involving repeatedly stabbing his elderly and immobile victim‘s arm with a knife merely for trying to stop defendant from battering another woman. These incidents evince defendant‘s propensity to physically injure others and thus to pose a serious danger to them. Although, as defendant notes, he confined his criminal behavior between the 1992 and 2012 attacks to mostly nonviolent conduct, he nevertheless reverted back to extreme violence in 2012. The trial court had a basis for believing that same risk exists today and that releasing him any earlier would endanger public safety.
Defendant asserts that the trial court abused its discretion for three further reasons. First, defendant argues that the trial court made no express finding that dismissal of the enhancements would “endanger public safety” and instead found only that dismissal would not be in the furtherance of justice. However, because whether dismissal of an enhancement is “in the furtherance of justice” is an ultimate finding that necessarily rests on a subsidiary finding that dismissal would endanger public safety, we may imply a finding of the latter from its express finding of the former. (E.g., People v. Calhoun (1983) 141 Cal.App.3d 117, 126; People v. Eberhardt (1986) 186 Cal.App.3d 1112, 1123.) Second, defendant seems to suggest that the trial court was not allowed to look to the conduct underlying the 1992 conviction in determining whether defendant‘s earlier release would endanger public safety because that conviction was more than five years old and hence qualified as a mitigating circumstance. This suggestion would require us to assume that an enhancement has been dismissed when trying to decide whether it should be dismissed. To us, this makes no sense because it puts the cart before the horse. Lastly, defendant argues that the trial court was also not allowed to look to the conduct underlying the convictions in this case because the underlying facts were already used to impose the great bodily injury enhancement, and
DISPOSITION
The judgment is reversed in part to the extent it failed to reflect the proper custody credits earned by defendant, and the trial court is directed to calculate
CERTIFIED FOR PARTIAL PUBLICATION.
HOFFSTADT, J.
We concur:
ASHMANN-GERST, Acting P. J.
CHAVEZ, J.