You don’t have to take my word for it. The court uses the word “quagmire” in yesterday’s decision in People v. Scarbrough, case no. C075414 (3d. Dist. Sept. 29, 2015), in which it holds that a trial court lacks jurisdiction to recall and reduce sentences under Proposition 47 when the judgment for those crimes is on appeal.
First, a brief reminder of what the California electorate voted into law last November. Prop 47 reclassifies certain crimes from felonies to misdemeanors and provides that persons convicted of felonies that are now classified as misdemeanors may “petition for a recall of sentence” to request resentencing under the new standards.
You can imagine there are quite a few defendants in line for this process. The Los Angeles Times reported just a few weeks after passage of Prop 47:
Judges expect that tens of thousands of Californians may seek to have their felony convictions reduced. Courts have had to scramble to handle the surge in workload, and some agencies are planning to ask for more public funding to cover the added duties.
Now, on to the quagmire. Defendant Scarbrough appealed her felony convictions. While her appeal was pending, she also filed a Prop 47 petition to be resentenced on the same convictions, and the trial court entered an order reducing her original sentence of 9 years, 4 months to just 6 years. Scarbrough attempted to abandon her appeal, but the Court of Appeal refused to dismiss it and asked for supplemental briefing on “an issue that is likely to recur and to otherwise evade review” — whether the trial court had jurisdiction to rule on a petition for recall and resentencing while appeal from the same convictions was pending.
Because the trial court determined that the trial court lacked such jurisdiction, its order reducing Scarbrough’s sentence is void. The obvious question then becomes: What about other defendants that have already been resentenced while their appeals were pending? Well, the court acknowledges that its ruling creates a mess, but provides no guidance as to how it will be cleaned up:
We do recognize that several people with pending appeals have been resentenced ostensibly pursuant to section 1170.18 while their appeals were pending. This does create a quagmire, especially as regards individuals who have been released as a result of their resentencing. However, that is an insufficient reason for us to find concurrent jurisdiction where it was not statutorily afforded.
Given the news coverage about the “flood” of Prop 47 petitions — the Sacramento Bee reported last month that 4,347 prisoners had been release under prop 47 through the first week of August, with many thousands more having been resentenced without being released — I was surprised that the court said that several” people had their resentencing petitions granted while their appeals were pending. While it makes sense that the vast majority of the petitions are from prisoners whose appeals are long over, “several” still strikes me as a surprising characterization of the number that have been resentenced or released while their appeals were pending.
Perhaps that makes the term quagmire all the more significant. If “several” void resentencing orders create a quagmire, what would have been created if the number of void resentencing orders numbered in the hundreds or thousands?