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C.A.’s Majority: Crimes So Horrendous That Re-Sentencing Under New Law Is Pointless
By a MetNews Staff Writer
The Court of Appeal for this district held yesterday, over a dissent, that an assailant’s victimizing of a woman was so horrendous that it would be pointless to remand for a re-sentencing to allow the judge to exercise discretion under a recently enacted ameliorative statute.
“Appellant sadistically terrorized M.Q. for two days, during which he repeatedly beat her and sprayed her with pepper spray,” Acting Presiding Justice Kenneth Yegan said in the majority opinion, in which Justice Steven Z. Perren joined. “He threatened to kill her, bit her face, and hit her with such force that it fractured her cheek bone.”
He added:
“[T]he current offenses were aggravated, sadistic, and extended over the course of 20 hours. This was akin to torture.”
SB 567
At issue was whether the case should be sent back to the Ventura Superior Court for a determination as to whether Penal Code section 1170(b)(6)—contained in SB 567, signed into law on Oct. 8 and effective Jan. 1—requires a resentencing of Norman Thomas Salazar, who was found guilty of false imprisonment by violence or menace and infliction of corporal injury on a person with whom he had a current or past dating relationship, with a strike. Judge Anthony J. Sabo chose the middle term, sentencing Salazar to seven years and four months in prison.
The new statutory provision requires selection of the low term where the defendant “has experienced psychological, physical, or childhood trauma,” as Salazar had, “unless the court finds that the aggravating circumstances outweigh the mitigating circumstances” and “that imposition of the low term would be contrary to the interests of justice.”
Yegan cited Art. VI, §13 of the California Constitution which declares that there is to be no reversal unless an appellate court “shall be of the opinion that the error complained of has resulted in a miscarriage of justice.”
Constitution Trumps Statute
He wrote:
“There should only be a reversal where it is reasonably probable that a more favorable outcome will result upon reversal….By its enactment of S.B. 567, the Legislature did not purport to, and could not, by statute, alter the California Constitution.”
The jurist went on to say: “We conclude the record ‘clearly indicates’ the trial court would not have imposed the low term had it been aware of its discretion to do so under S.B. 567….Remand for resentencing would be an idle act. The offenses committed by appellant in this case were horrendous. For what appellant did over the course of two days, an aggregate unstayed sentence of seven years and four months is lenient. He could have easily been sentenced to the upper term. As a matter of law, (1) the aggravating circumstances are overwhelming and outweigh any theoretical mitigating circumstances, and (2) selection of the low term would be “contrary to the interests of justice.”
The opinion rejects Salazar’s contentions that he has been subjected to multiple punishments for the same act and that Sabo abused his discretion in declining to strike the prior.
Tangeman’s Dissent
Justice Martin J. Tangeman said in his dissent:
“We depart from our duties as a court of review when we unilaterally conclude that some crimes are sufficiently ‘horrendous,’ or some sentences so ‘lenient.’ that any lesser sentence would be ‘contrary to the interests of justice’ ‘[a]s a matter of law.’…I would remand to the trial court to exercise its discretion based on the intervening legislative directives.”
The case is People v. Salazar, 2022 S.O.S. 2756.
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