Opinion ID: 2543849
Heading Depth: 1
Heading Rank: 4

Heading: May and should the superior court review the evaluators' reports to determine whether they are infected with legal error?

Text: As we have explained, a petition for commitment or recommitment under the SVPA cannot be filed unless two designated evaluators under section 6601, subdivision (d), or two independent evaluators under section 6601, subdivision (e), concur that the person meets the criteria for commitment. Insofar as the evaluators' recommendations represent the application of their professional expertise and judgment within statutory requirements, those recommendations conclusively determine whether an SVPA petition may be filed. On the other hand, the statute does not allow the evaluators utter free rein. Instead, it imposes certain specific standards on their assessments. They must examine the person in accordance with a standardized assessment protocol that considers diagnosable mental disorders, as well as various factors, including criminal and psychosexual history, type, degree, and duration of sexual deviance, and severity of mental disorder, which factors are known to be associated with the risk of reoffense among sex offenders. (§ 6601, subd. (c).) On this basis, the evaluators are to answer a crucial question, i.e., whether the person has a diagnosed mental disorder so that he or she is likely to engage in acts of sexual violence without appropriate treatment and custody.  ( Id., subd. (d), italics added.) The evaluators' professional judgment is therefore to be exercised within a specified legal framework, and their legally accurate understanding of the statutory criteria is crucial to the Act's proper operation. In the case before us, questions have arisen whether one or more of the designated evaluators, lacking guidance as to the meaning of the statutory criteria, may have understood them inaccurately, and thus committed legal error, when reaching conclusions that Ghilotti does not qualify for recommitment under the SVPA. We must therefore determine the means of resolving that issue. The SVPA contains no express provision for judicial review of the reports of designated evaluators to determine whether they are infected with legal error. It appears to be an issue of first impression whether a court entertaining a petition for an involuntary civil commitment has authority to review for legal error the expert evaluations which are a prerequisite to the filing of such a petition. Under the SVPA, however, an affirmative conclusion is inherent in the statutory scheme, and in the nature of the judicial power. As we have indicated, the SVPA makes the evaluators' conclusions, reached pursuant to the specific procedures and standards described above, critical to the legal authority to file a petition for commitment or recommitment. (§ 6601, subds.(d)-(f).) Without the concurrence of two evaluators, as set forth in the statute, no such petition may be filed, and the person must be unconditionally released without further proceedings to determine if he or she is an SVP. On the other hand, with such concurrence, a petition may be filed, and proceedings to determine whether the person is an SVP may go forward. The statutory scheme thus necessarily calls into question whether the evaluators, in reaching their conclusions at this critical gatekeeping stage, have accurately understood the statutory criteria. When such a question arises, the superior court entertaining the petition must address it. A distant analogy arises under the law allowing diversion of certain convicted persons for hospital treatment of their narcotics addictions. (§ 3050 et seq.) Under this law, a court, upon finding that the person is addicted, or in imminent danger of being addicted, to narcotics, and that the person's pattern of criminality does not make him or her an unfit subject for diversion, may suspend execution of the sentence and commit the person to the California Rehabilitation Center (CRC) for appropriate treatment. (§ 3051.) However, if the Director of Corrections thereafter determines that because of excessive criminality or for other relevant reason, the person is not a fit subject for detention and treatment at CRC, that official shall return the person to the superior court for resumption of criminal proceedings. (§ 3053, subd. (a).) Though the CRC diversion statute does not expressly provide for judicial review of the decision of the Director of Corrections, case law has long held that the decision is judicially reviewable. (E.g., People v. Toscano (1977) 69 Cal.App.3d 140, 146-147, 137 Cal. Rptr. 893 [noting People's right of appeal from judicial decision recommitting person to CRC after rejection by Director of Corrections]; People v. Peoro (1976) 56 Cal. App.3d 35, 39, 128 Cal.Rptr. 130 [same]; People v. Munoz (1973) 31 Cal.App.3d 87, 91, 107 Cal.Rptr. 451 [same]; People v. Morgan (1971) 21 Cal.App.3d 33, 38-39, 98 Cal.Rptr. 165; People v. Berry (1967) 247 Cal.App.2d 846, 849-850, 56 Cal.Rptr. 123.) We say the analogy is distant because the procedural contexts of the two schemes are not identical. Under the CRC diversion statute, the Director makes a final decision to reject an already committed divertee (§ 3053, subd. (a)), while under the SVPA, the evaluators' reports simply determine whether a commitment petition may be filed in the first instance. However, the premise is the same; the court has authority to provide legal oversight of an administrative determination which involves the exercise of discretion or judgment subject to statutory standards, and which has a legal effect on proceedings properly before the court. [8] Ghilotti urges that the SVPA's requirement of the concurrence of two evaluators (§ 6601, subds.(d)-(f)), together with the statute's failure to provide specifically for judicial review of the evaluators' reports, gives rise to a statutory right, and thus a state-created constitutional due process right (see Hicks v. Oklahoma (1980) 447 U.S. 343, 346, 100 S.Ct. 2227, 65 L.Ed.2d 175), to unquestioning reliance on the evaluators' conclusions. Under these circumstances, Ghilotti insists, any judicial review of the evaluators' analyses constitutes an act in excess of jurisdiction. (See Abelleira v. District Court of Appeal (1941) 17 Cal.2d 280, 288, 109 P.2d 942.) We disagree. Ghilotti's arguments beg the question of what the SVPA requires or forbids. As we have explained, the requirement that SVPA evaluators apply criteria set forth in the statute invokes the inherent judicial power to determine whether an evaluator's recommendation stems, on its face, from an inaccurate understanding of those criteria, and thus constitutes legal error. Nothing in the SVPA indicates otherwise. Of course, the court entertaining an SVPA commitment or recommitment petition does not have a sua sponte duty to examine the reports of designated evaluators in every case. The court should exercise its authority to do so only where the issue is properly in dispute. On the other hand, the Director, who has custody of persons committed under the SVPA, oversees their diagnosis and treatment while they are committed, and is responsible for the initiation of commitment or recommitment proceedings, cannot be powerless to take action for the public safety when he disagrees, on legal grounds, with evaluators' conclusions that a person does not meet the criteria for commitment or recommitment. Means must exist by which he can make that issue the subject of judicial inquiry. Thus, in future cases like this one, when the Director (1) receives one or more formal evaluations that recommend against commitment or recommitment, (2) disagrees with those recommendations, (3) believes they may be infected with material legal error, and (4) does not choose, or is not permitted within the statutory scheme, to seek additional evaluations, he may nonetheless forward a request that an SVPA commitment or recommitment petition be filed, and the county's attorney may submit such a petition for filing, with copies of the evaluators' reports attached. (See, e.g., In re Parker (1998) 60 Cal. App.4th 1453, 1468-1469, fn. 15, 71 Cal. Rptr.2d 167.) The person named in the petition may then file a pleading challenging the validity of the petition on grounds that it is not supported by the concurrence of two evaluators under section 6601, subdivisions (d) through (f). In response, the petitioning authorities may defend the petition by asserting that one or more noncohcurring reports are infected by legal error. Similarly, if the Director has obtained reports that do concur the person meets the criteria for commitment or recommitment, and a petition is filed on that basis, the evaluators' reports should also be attached to the petition. The person may then file a pleading challenging the petition's validity on grounds that one or more of the supposedly concurring reports are infected by legal error. [9] We stress that such judicial review is limited to whether one or more evaluators' reports are infected by material legal error. An evaluator's report is infected with legal error if, on its face, it reflects an inaccurate understanding of the statutory criteria governing the evaluation. On the other hand, judicial review of an evaluator's report does not extend to matters of debatable professional judgment within an evaluator's expertise. The professional determinations of an evaluator, insofar as based on consideration and application of correct legal standards, is conclusive at the initial screening stage set forth in section 6601. If the court concludes that one or more evaluators has committed legal error in reaching his or her conclusions, the court must further determine whether the error is material. An evaluator's legal error shall be deemed material if, and only if, (1) there appears a reasonable probability, sufficient to undermine confidence in the outcome, that the error affected the evaluator's ultimate conclusion, and (2) a change in the evaluator's conclusion would either supply, or dissolve, the necessary concurrence of two designated evaluators. If the court's review of the reports indicates that the conclusions drawn by the evaluators are not infected by legal error as indicated above, or that any error was immaterial, it must accept the recommendations set forth in the reports and take the appropriate responsive action, either by dismissing the petition, or by going forward with proceedings to determine whether the person is an SVP. If the court finds material legal error in an evaluator's report, the court shall provide the evaluator opportunity promptly either to correct the report or to prepare a new report, so as to set forth the conclusions the evaluator reaches under correct legal principles. [10] Ghilotti and his amici curiae claim the People waived judicial examination of the evaluators' reports in this case because they expressly disclaimed reliance on the reports, never asked the court to review them, conceded they were unsupportive, did not argue they were legally defective, and persisted in this course though given multiple opportunities to abandon it. Thus, Ghilotti and his amici curiae suggest, there was no basis for the court to examine reports which, they say, were extrinsic to the proceeding. This overstates the facts. When, at the hearing of November 29, 2001, the superior court broached the issue whether the evaluators had followed the correct criteria, the county's attorney did belatedly ask whether the court wished to review the reports, but the court demurred. The court later granted a continuance, but only to allow the Department unilaterally to reject the current evaluators' reports as incompetent, and to seek new evaluations. [11] In any event, it seems clear that both the court and the parties were understandably uncertain how to proceed in the unusual procedural situation presented by the case. On the one hand, the evaluators designated by the Director had recommended against Ghilotti's recommitment. The SVPA provides no direct hint that the legal validity of such recommendations is subject to judicial review, and no prior decision has addressed that issue. Thus, as of November 2001, it was entirely plausible for both the parties and the court to conclude, as they apparently did, that review of evaluators' recommendations for legal error was outside the judicial province. On the other hand, both the Director and the superior court questioned whether the evaluators in fact had applied the statute in a legally correct manneras the court phrased it, whether their conclusions were legally incompetentand whether legal error had affected the evaluators' conclusions that Ghilotti does not meet the statutory criteria for continued confinement, supervision, and treatment. In these circumstances, and given the important public safety interests at stake, we cannot conclude that the issue was waived. Under the extraordinary circumstances, we conclude, we must vacate the Court of Appeal's order denying mandamus. We will direct the Court of Appeal to issue a writ of mandamus vacating the superior court's order dismissing the 2001 recommitment petition, and to remand the matter to the trial court with directions (1) to review the reports of the designated evaluators for material legal error, and (2) thereafter to proceed under the principles expressed in this opinion. Before entering our dispositional order, however, we address an additional issue pertinent to the further proceedings we contemplate.