Resentencing Properly Denied Based on Hearsay Testimony

Wednesday, May 6, 2026

Page 4

Court of Appeal:

Resentencing Properly Denied Based on Hearsay Testimony

Wiley Says Officer’s Sworn Account as to Suspect, Admittedly Involved in Shooting, Telling Jailhouse Informer That Defendant Pulled Trigger, Causing Death, Was Correctly Admitted as Declaration Against Interest

By a MetNews Staff Writer

A judge properly denied a petition for resentencing based on the preliminary hearing testimony of a Los Angeles police officer who related that a man who, in implicating himself in a fatal shooting, had identified the appellant as the triggerman, Div. Eight of the Court of Appeal for this district has determined, holding that an exception to the hearsay rule for statements made against penal interests applies.

Although Gilberto Salinas, the acknowledged participant in a gang-versus-gang altercation, did not act in contravention of his personal interests in naming Alvin Pineda as the shooter, the panel deemed it sufficient, for the exception to come into play, that the accusation came in the course of an account in which Salinas acknowledged criminal involvement in a fray that ended in one death and the injury of three or four others.

Pineda pled no contest to voluntary manslaughter and two counts of attempted murder.

The opinion, filed Monday, affirms an order by Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Laura R. Walton who ruled that relief pursuant to Penal Code §1172.6—which provides for resentencing of persons convicted of murder or attempted murder under theories that have been legislatively eliminated—is unavailable to Pineda because, as the actual killer, he could be convicted under the current state of the law.

Walton acted based on the testimony by Officer Jose Carias who had told, at the preliminary hearing, how an informant posed as a jail inmate and elicited from Salinas, then an incarcerated suspect in the shooting, information about the encounter. The conversation was audio-recorded.

Wiley’s Opinion

In his opinion affirming Walton’s order, Justice John Shepard Wiley Jr. observed:

“[I]n determining whether Pineda could still be convicted under current law, the trial court could consider the hearsay testimony of Carias, but only if a hearsay exception lifted the basic hearsay bar….

“The pivotal question is whether the trial court properly admitted Carias’s testimony relaying what codefendant Gilberto Salinas said….Without that evidence, the prosecution could not identify Pineda as the shooter.”

Admissible Hearsay

He pointed to Evidence Code §1230 which says, with emphasis added by Wiley:

“Evidence of a statement by a declarant...is not made inadmissible by the hearsay rule if the declarant is unavailable as a witness and the statement, when made,...so far subjected him to the risk of civil or criminal liability,...that a reasonable [person] in his position would not have made the statement unless he believed it to be true.”

The jurist wrote:

“Salinas’s statements were declarations against interest….They subjected Salinas to a risk of criminal liability. Reasonable people in Salinas’s position would not have made these statements unless they believed them.”

The case is People v. Pineda, B343654.