Who said crime doesn’t pay?
California voters — with the help of Proposition 47 authors more concerned about emptying state prisons than justice who created loopholes a jumbo jet could fly through and a state Supreme Court eager to play lawmakers — have done just that.
Last week the state high court majority decided that shoplifting does not just refer to swiping merchandise from a store. The 5-2 decision involved a case of one Giovanni Gonzales convicted of felony burglary. He took checks he stole from his grandmother Josefa Valencia’s checkbook while visiting her in December 2013. He then twice entered a bank and cashed a check made out to him for $125. His grandmother neither signed the checks nor gave him permission to cash them.
Gonzales was charged with two felonies — second degree burglary and forgery. In the typical “Let’s Make a Deal” game show fashion that district attorneys have been forced to pursue to keep the judicial system from coming to a complete stand still, a plea deal was made so the matter didn’t have to go to court. In return for Gonzales pleading guilty to burglary, the forgery charge was dropped. Instead of serving jail time, the deal called for him to be on probation for three years.
Gonzales — as the outstanding citizen that he is in stealing from his own grandmother — admitted violating probation. His probation was revoked and reinstated which meant he still got no jail time. Then — surprise, surprise — Gonzales was accused again and charged with a second violation of parole
In keeping with the spirit of accepting no responsibility for his actions, Gonzales petitioned to have his original sentence overturned. The trial court — backed up by the Court of Appeal — rejected his move.
Now for the fun part. The majority of the state high court took the bait — hook, line, and sinker.
Gonzales argued because he entered a commercial establishment — a place law abiding citizens that don’t sit on the California Supreme Court refer to as a bank — during normal business hours with the intent to steal less than $950 that it constituted shoplifting.
His argument was that he planned to commit larceny instead of passing forged checks that — as the prosecution pointed out — under the law is considered theft by false pretensions.
The court cited a 1998 California court decision that, in the state high court’s majority opinion published last week states, “The crime of larceny derived from the common law and required both taking without the property owner’s consent and asportation (the carrying away) of the property with the intent to permanently deprive the owner of its possession.”
OK, so there is no doubt he committed larceny.
The court then contends the term “shoplifting” was ambiguous in Proposition 47. The court stated “If the language (in a statute) is unambiguous, there is no need for further construction. If, however, the language is susceptible of more than one reasonable meaning, we may consider the ballot summaries and arguments to determine how the votes understood the ballot measure and what they intended in enacting it.”
I’m no Philadelphia lawyer looking to exploit legal technicalities, but I’m willing to bet you 9 out of 10 voters being told someone was trying to avoid jail time for stealing checks from their grandmother and then defraud a bank of $250 would not consider such an act shoplifting.
But the court did just that by adding into the mix that it was the intent of voters in approving Proposition 47 based on ballot arguments to reduce prison and jail time.
The state high court essentially is arguing the foundation of Proposition 47 was the electorate writing a get out of jail free card and not simply scaling back specific sentences.
Of course the original sin here is the DA making a deal in the first place. Gonzales clearly committed forgery given his grandmother did not sign the checks that he stole from her.
You might argue the state high court is only doing its job and that the prosecuting DA was somehow careless.
But it would be a stretch to argue that voters wanted theft of checks and subsequent forgery that allowed them to be cashed in a bank to be equated to “shoplifting.” You’d also have to be a legal contortionist to interpret Proposition 47 as being understood by voters as a starting point to essentially decriminalize forgery.
The odds are Proposition 47 wouldn’t have passed if many voters knew, for an example, that someone arrested by police with a stolen forearm would be charged with a misdemeanor and not a felony.
Proposition 47 was sold to voters as a way to reduce sentence for so-called “harmless” crimes such as drug use, petty theft, and shoplifting.
Never once did the authors buy TV ads, mention in a ballot argument, or publically state that stolen arms that statistics show have almost a 100 percent chance of surfacing in a violent crime were included in the Proposition 47 sentence reduction language
One, of course, can’t make such an argument to have gun crimes excluded from implementation of Proposition 47 because that would not dovetail with the California Supreme Court’s agenda.

Disclaimer






This column is the opinion of executive editor, Dennis Wyatt, and does not necessarily represent the opinion of The Bulletin or Morris Newspaper Corp. of CA.  He can be contacted at dwyatt@mantecabulletin.com or 209.249.3519.