Published
4 years agoon
Two young men drive up to a small corner grocery store in an inner city neighborhood and the driver remains at the wheel while his masked partner runs into the store, gun in hand, to commit a robbery.
The latter exception was inserted into the bill as a sop to law enforcement officials and prosecutors who strenuously opposed the measure.
The rationale for repealing felony murder, offered by the bill’s author, Sen. Nancy Skinner, a Berkeley Democrat, and criminal justice reform groups is that it unfairly penalized criminal accomplices, many of them women, who didn’t intend that anyone die.
Among other things, it allows several hundred prison inmates convicted under the law to petition for reduction of sentences.
Prosecutors and police not only opposed the measure on its underlying rationale, saying it would go too easy on dangerous criminals, but also because the threat of felony murder prosecution has been a valuable tool to persuade those involved in fatal felonies to turn on their accomplices.
In the hypothetical case cited above, the holdup’s getaway driver, facing a felony murder charge, might be willing to provide police with evidence, such as the gun, to convict the shooter in return for leniency.
While the Legislature and Brown have virtually repealed felony murder, they don’t get the last word.
Several courts have upheld the law’s validity, but this month, an Orange County Superior Court judge, Gregg Prickett, allowed a felony murder case against an accomplice in a 2016 homicide to proceed, declaring that SB 1437 is unconstitutional.
Prickett, who was an Orange County prosecutor before being appointed to the bench in 1995, ruled that California voters locked felony murder into law while passing ballot measures in 1978 and 1990, so it would require another action by voters to repeal it.
Dan Walters has been a journalist for nearly 60 years, spending all but a few of those years working for California newspapers. He has written more than 9,000 columns about the state and its politics and is the founding editor of the “California Political Almanac.” Dan has also been a frequent guest on national television news shows, commenting on California issues and policies.
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