Opinion ID: 2612406
Heading Depth: 1
Heading Rank: 2

Heading: Validity of warrant as jury element of peace-officer assault and peace-officer murder.

Text: (16a) Only one special circumstance was alleged and found true, i.e., that defendant knowingly and intentionally killed a peace officer engaged in ... the performance of ... duties. (§ 190.2, subd. (a)(7).) [10] Defendant was also convicted of aggravated assault against a peace officer engaged in the performance of ... duties. (§ 245, subd. (c).) [11] Both the assault charge and the special circumstance finding must be reversed, he urges, because in both cases he was wrongly denied a jury determination of the engaged-in-duty element. Defendant invokes the long-standing rule in California and other jurisdictions that although one is not immune from criminal liability for his resistance to an invalid police action, he cannot be convicted of an offense against a peace officer engaged in ... the performance of ... duties unless the officer was acting lawfully at the time. (E.g., People v. Curtis (1969) 70 Cal.2d 347, 354-356 [74 Cal. Rptr. 713, 450 P.2d 33]; People v. Henderson (1976) 58 Cal. App.3d 349, 357 [129 Cal. Rptr. 844]; Jackson v. Superior Court (1950) 98 Cal. App.2d 183, 188-189 [219 P.2d 879]; Sparks v. United States (6th Cir.1937) 90 F.2d 61, 63-65.) The rule flows from the premise that because an officer has no duty to take illegal action, he or she is not engaged in duties, for purposes of an offense defined in such terms, if the officer's conduct is unlawful. (E.g., Curtis, supra, 70 Cal.2d at pp. 354-355; Jackson, supra, at p. 189.) California cases hold that although the court, not the jury, usually decides whether police action was supported by legal cause, disputed facts bearing on the issue of legal cause must be submitted to the jury considering an engaged-in-duty element, since the lawfulness of the victim's conduct forms part of the corpus delicti of the offense. ( Henderson, supra, 58 Cal. App.3d at pp. 358-359; People v. Jones (1970) 8 Cal. App.3d 710, 716 [87 Cal. Rptr. 625]; People v. Muniz (1970) 4 Cal. App.3d 562, 568 [84 Cal. Rptr. 501]; People v. Soto (1969) 276 Cal. App.2d 81, 86-87 [80 Cal. Rptr. 627]; but see Curtis, supra, 70 Cal.2d at pp. 358-359.) Defendant claims the trial court thus erred by stating for purposes of these instructions that an officer ... serving ... a search warrant is acting lawful[ly], and is thus engaged in the performance of his duties. [12] This instruction, defendant urges, wrongly withdrew the issue of the warrant's validity from the jury's consideration. We disagree. Squarely faced with the issue for the first time, we conclude that if a warrant is valid on its face, an officer carrying out its command to search or arrest is lawfully engaged in duty, and his or her attacker may be convicted and punished on that basis, even if the facts disclosed to the magistrate in support of the warrant were not legally sufficient to establish probable cause. A contrary construction of the engaged-in-duty requirement would defy reason. By overlooking the traditional statutory authority and duty of peace officers to execute facially regular warrants, such an interpretation would misapply the premise that an officer has no duty to take illegal action. It would ignore the historic preference for warrants. And it would undermine the Legislature's efforts to deter and punish violence upon peace officers acting in that capacity. The law has long been concerned with the treatment of a citizen who resists or obstructs the assertion of police authority. Since 1872, section 148 has made it a misdemeanor to resist, delay, or obstruct an officer engaged in discharging any duty of his office. Unjustified violence against an officer, as against any other citizen, was also punishable under the general statutes defining assault, battery, attempted murder, and homicide. On the other hand, most American jurisdictions, including California, recognized a traditional privilege to resist unlawful police conduct with reasonable force. ( People v. Curtis, supra, 70 Cal.2d at p. 351.) Many early cases applied this common law principle to limit the application of section 148. They reasoned that because the offense described by section 148 could be committed only against an officer engaged in duty, and because an officer has no duty to take illegal action, the statute did not prohibit resistance to an unlawful arrest. (E.g., Jackson v. Superior Court, supra, 98 Cal. App.2d at p. 189; see also People v. Craig (1881) 59 Cal. 370; People v. Perry (1947) 79 Cal. App.2d Supp. 906 [180 P.2d 465].) However, the 1957 Legislature enacted section 834a, which imposes a duty on citizens to refrain from forcible resistance to arrest. [13] In People v. Curtis, supra , we held that section 834a applies to unlawful as well as lawful arrests, so long as the officer has not used excessive force. (70 Cal.2d at pp. 351-354.) The statute's purpose, we said, was to eliminate the anachronistic privilege of violent self-help against police conduct undertaken without sufficient cause or authority, and to remove disputes about legality from the streets to the courts. ( Id., at pp. 352-353.) As a result of section 834a, any violent resistance to the humane assertion of police authority is punishable under the criminal laws, even if the officer's action lacked legal cause or otherwise exceeded his or her authority. In 1961, the Legislature took another important step toward the protection of peace officers who face violent resistance in the field. It created special new crimes of battery and aggravated assault against peace officer[s] ... engaged in the performance of ... duties. (See now §§ 243, subd. (b), 245, subd. (c).) In Curtis, supra, we held that by requiring the officer-victim's engagement in duties, the new statutes implicitly incorporated prior judicial limitations on the term duty as construed in connection with section 148. Hence, we held, one could not be convicted of assault or battery against a peace officer ... engaged in the performance of ... duties unless the officer-victim's performance was lawful. (70 Cal.2d at p. 355.) We further concluded that our limiting construction of the new peace-officer offenses should not be affected by the intervening enactment of section 834a. [S]ection 834a, we said, was meant at most to eliminate the common law defense of resistance to unlawful arrest, and not to make such resistance a new substantive crime. (70 Cal.2d at pp. 354-355.) Thus, Curtis reasoned, while violent resistance to an illegal arrest may be a crime, it is not a crime against a peace officer engaged in duties. ( Id., at pp. 355-356.) [14] Curtis contains dictum suggesting that an officer acts illegally, and thus is not engaged in ... duties for purposes of a peace-officer offense or enhancement, if a warrant he is attempting to execute is invalid. (70 Cal.2d at p. 354, fn. 4; see also discussion, post. ) However, we have found no California decision which directly confronts that issue. On their facts, the California cases hold at most that the validity of an officer's decisions in the field bear on whether he or she was acting lawfully, and thus was engaged in duty, at the time the officer encountered violent resistance. [15] This is an understandable result given the statutory language, the sensitive realities of police-citizen contacts, and the complicated development of the law governing resistance. By its terms, the engaged-in-duty element focuses on the officer's performance of duties. Under this language, it is pertinent to inquire whether the officer's judgment that led to violence was correct or incorrect. Moreover, unilateral decisions by officers in the field are rife with the dangerous potential for overreaching, arbitrary harassment, and the violation of individual rights. (See, e.g., Jackson v. Superior Court, supra, 98 Cal. App.2d at p. 186.) Misunderstandings may arise in the heat of the moment about the officer's intentions, motives, good faith, and authority. A citizen confronted in such circumstances may have a colorable basis for belief that the unilateral police attempt to restrict his freedom or invade his privacy is arbitrary and wrongful. The cases imply that the law thus intends the officer to accept some responsibility for his or her own error. Even if the citizen is not privileged to resist a police misjudgment, they reason, the statutes nonetheless withhold from the officer any special protection that might arise from the officer's engagement in duty. No similar considerations apply, however, when the officer's authority to act is premised on a facially valid warrant. When the police submit their suspicions for judicial evaluation, obtain a warrant regular on its face, and act only as it expressly authorizes and commands, [16] no issue of fault in the serving officer's performance of ... duties arises. The officer and his or her colleagues have done everything possible to perform their duty, and to do so lawfully. Indeed, California's law of arrest so provides. Section 836 specifies limits on an officer's authority to arrest without a warrant but states simply that he may make an arrest in obedience to a warrant. [17] Civil Code section 43.55 (formerly Civ. Code, § 43.5(a)) immunizes a peace officer from liability for nonnegligent execution of an arrest warrant regular on its face, regardless of any underlying deficiency. [18] Cases consistently explain that this statutory immunity stems from the duty of peace officers to carry out judicial orders according to their terms without considering whether they are void or erroneous. (E.g., Vallindras v. Massachusetts etc. Ins. Co. (1954) 42 Cal.2d 149, 153-154 [265 P.2d 907]; Herndon v. County of Marin (1972) 25 Cal. App.3d 933, 936-937 [102 Cal. Rptr. 221].) (17) Whenever possible, courts must construe statutes harmoniously and avoid absurd or anomalous results. (E.g., People v. Comingore (1977) 20 Cal.3d 142, 147 [141 Cal. Rptr 542, 570 P.2d 723]; People v. Daniels (1969) 71 Cal.2d 1119, 1130 [80 Cal. Rptr. 897, 459 P.2d 225, 43 A.L.R.3d 677]; Select Base Materials v. Board of Equal. (1959) 51 Cal.2d 640, 645 [335 P.2d 672].) (16b) Nothing in the language or history of the engaged-in-duty requirement suggests a legislative intent to depart from the well-established statutory principle that official duty includes the execution of facially regular warrants. Nor can we perceive any policy that would have persuaded the Legislature or the voters to make an officer's special protection against violent resistance dependent on the underlying validity of a warrant. The law harbors a strong preference for warrants precisely because the detached scrutiny of a neutral magistrate is a more reliable safeguard against overreaching than the hurried judgment of a law enforcement officer `engaged in the often competitive enterprise of ferreting out crime,' ... ( United States v. Chadwick (1977) 433 U.S. 1, 9 [53 L.Ed.2d 538, 547, 97 S.Ct. 2476], quoting Johnson v. United States (1948) 333 U.S. 10, 14 [92 L.Ed. 436, 440, 68 S.Ct. 367].) This preference for resort to the warrant process is honored by according particular deference to the magistrate's determination of probable cause. (E.g., Illinois v. Gates, supra, 462 U.S. 213, 236 [76 L.Ed.2d at pp. 546-547].) That being so, judicial reappraisal of the magistrate's decision to issue a warrant should not strip the serving officer of the special statutory protection against violent resistance. Any such rule would not likely deter misconduct either by the police or by judicial officers. (Cf. United States v. Leon (1984) 468 U.S. 897, 915-921 [82 L.Ed.2d 677, 693-697, 104 S.Ct. 3405].) By the same token, a warrant removes all colorable basis for on-the-spot disputes about the officer's authority. That a citizen might have reason to suspect a warrant's underlying support, or that he might later prevail in a judicial attack on the warrant, has no rational relationship to the degree of his culpability for violent resistance at the moment the warrant is served. Forcible resistance to a warrant invokes society's particular abhor[rence] of violence against persons whose official roles as defenders of public safety place them at special risk. (See People v. Rodriguez (1986) 42 Cal.3d 730, 781 [230 Cal. Rptr. 667, 726 P.2d 113].) By its nature, violence of this kind ... hinder[s] the completion of vital public safety tasks; ... evince[s] a particular contempt for law and government; and ... strike[s] at the heart of a system of ordered liberty.... ( Ibid. ) Such resistance thus justifies the special treatment our statutes accord to those who attack peace officers lawfully performing [their] duties. ( Ibid. ) Under these circumstances, we cannot imagine the Legislature or the voters intended to divest a peace officer of special statutory protection simply because the warrant the officer was serving when attacked is later found lacking in probable cause. We decline to extend the reasoning of Curtis and its progeny to such a case. We hold that whenever a criminal statute accords special treatment to violence against a peace officer engaged in ... duties, such duties include the correct service of a facially valid search or arrest warrant, regardless of the legal sufficiency of the facts shown in support of the warrant. Dictum to the contrary in Curtis is disapproved. [19] Accordingly, we reject defendant's contention that the instructions on peace-officer assault and the peace-officer special circumstance improperly eliminated the probable cause issue from the jury's consideration. (18) Defendant argues that the court's instruction also eliminated from the jury's engaged-in-duty analysis the issue whether the warrant was lawfully executed. We agree that the proper service of a warrant is a jury issue under the engaged-in-duty requirement. ( Henderson, supra, 58 Cal. App.3d at p. 357.) We conclude, however, that the instant instruction properly presented the service issue for the jury's consideration. The court instructed that an officer executing a warrant upon a house may break and enter if, after announcing notice of his authority and purpose, he is refused admittance. In deciding whether there was a refusal of admittance after an announcement, the court advised, the jury could consider various factors. [20] Defendant claims this instruction assumed that Deputy Williams and his colleagues had announced their authority and purpose, an issue in dispute. However, the instruction manifestly made no such assumption. It advised that forced entry was lawful only  if, after announcing notice of ... authority and purpose, the officers were denied admittance. (Italics added.) The issue whether the officers did announce their identity and purpose was thus left to the jury.