Opinion ID: 3039107
Heading Depth: 4
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: When a battery is committed against a spouse, a

Text: person with whom the defendant is cohabiting, a person who is the parent of the defendant’s child, former spouse, fiancé, or fiancée, or a person with whom the defendant currently has, or has previously had, a dating or engagement relationship, the battery is punishable by a fine not exceeding two thousand dollars . . . , or by imprisonment in a county jail for a period of not more than one year, or by both that fine and imprisonment. CAL. PENAL CODE § 243(e)(1) (West 2000 & Supp. 2005). Battery is defined by California Penal Code section 242 as “any willful and unlawful use of force or violence upon the person of another.” [4] We recently observed that “[l]ooking at how California courts have interpreted the phrase ‘use of force or violence’ in section 242, it becomes evident that the phrase is a term of art, requiring neither a force capable of hurting or causing injury nor violence in the usual sense of the term.” Ortega17424 GALEANA-MENDOZA v. GONZALES Mendez, 450 F.3d at 1016. As one California court has explained: “[e]ven though the statutory definition of battery requires ‘force or violence’ (Pen.Code, § 242), this has the special legal meaning of a harmful or offensive touching.” People v. Page, 123 Cal. App. 4th 1466, 1473 n.1 (2004); see also People v. Martinez, 3 Cal. App. 3d 886, 889 (1970) (“Any harmful or offensive touching constitutes an unlawful use of force or violence.”). To qualify as a battery under section 242, “force against the person is enough; it need not be violent or severe, it need not cause bodily harm or even pain, and it need not leave any mark.” People v. Mansfield, 200 Cal. App. 3d 82, 88 (1988) (second emphasis added) (quoting 1 WITKIN, CALIFORNIA CRIMES: CRIMES AGAINST THE PERSON § 258 (1963)); see People v. Colantuono, 7 Cal. 4th 206, 214 n.4 (1994); People v. Ausbie, 123 Cal. App. 4th 855, 860 n.2 (2004); People v. Lindsay, 209 Cal. App. 3d 849, 855 (1989); see also CHARLES E. TORCIA, 2 WHARTON’S CRIMINAL LAW § 177 (15th ed. West 2006) (“A defendant commits a battery when he . . . shoves, pushes, or touches [another person] in an angry, indecent, rude, insolent, or hostile manner.”). In accord with the California courts’ interpretation of the battery statute, the standard California jury instruction defines “force and violence” for the purposes of that statute as follows: As used in the foregoing, the words “force” and “violence” are synonymous and mean any [unlawful] application of physical force against the person of another, even though it causes no pain or bodily harm or leaves no mark and even though only the feelings of such person are injured by the act. The slightest [unlawful] touching, if done in an insolent, rude, or an angry manner, is sufficient. It is not necessary that the touching be done in actual anger or with actual malice; it is sufficient if it was unwarranted and unjustifiable. GALEANA-MENDOZA v. GONZALES 17425 The touching essential to a battery may be a touching of the person, of the person’s clothing, or of something attached to or closely connected with the person. California Jury Instructions—Criminal 16.141 (2006). [5] In addition, although the offense of battery carries a specific intent element, “[a] person need not have an intent to injure to commit a battery[,] [h]e only needs to intend to commit the act.” Mansfield, 200 Cal. App. 3d at 88. Finally, California Penal Code section 243(e) adds to battery as defined by section 242 only the element of having been “committed against a spouse, a person with whom the defendant is cohabiting, a person who is the parent of the defendant’s child, former spouse, fiancé, or fiancée, or a person with whom the defendant currently has, or has previously had, a dating or engagement relationship,” CAL. PENAL CODE § 243(e)(1). Our question, then, is whether given these elements, the full range of conduct proscribed by section 243(e) involves moral turpitude. We hold that it does not. [6] The moral turpitude category includes, of course, as “grave acts of baseness or depravity,” many use-of-physicalforce offenses, including those that have as an element the infliction of injury upon a person with whom the perpetrator has a particular, special relationship. See Grageda v. INS, 12 F.3d 919, 922 (9th Cir. 1993) (holding that the “willful[ ] inflict[ion] upon . . . [one’s] spouse, . . . corporal injury resulting in a traumatic condition” is a crime involving moral turpitude); Guerrero de Nodahl v. INS, 407 F.2d 1405, 1406-07 (1969) (holding that the offense of “[willfully] inflicting ‘cruel or inhuman corporal punishment or injury’ upon a child” is a crime involving moral turpitude). Unlike the statutory sections considered in Grageda and Guerrero de Nodahl, however, section 243(e) requires no injury at all. 17426 GALEANA-MENDOZA v. GONZALES [7] The government notes that, even with no injury element, section 243(e) touches upon relationships of a special, domestic nature. This element the government maintains, brings the offense within the category of crimes involving moral turpitude. We disagree. Given that force that is neither violent nor severe and that causes neither pain nor bodily harm may constitute battery, the relationship element of section 243(e)(1) is not sufficient to, by itself, transform every battery under section 243(e) into a crime categorically grave, base, or depraved. Grageda, a case concerning “[the] willful[ ] inflict[ion] upon . . . [one’s] spouse, . . . corporal injury resulting in a traumatic condition,” 12 F.3d at 921, does not detract from this conclusion. Grageda noted that the relationship between spouses “makes the crime of spousal abuse different from violence between strangers or acquaintances, which, depending on the wording of the statute, is not necessarily a crime of moral turpitude.” Id. at 922. We reasoned there that “when a person beats his or her spouse severely enough to cause ‘a traumatic condition,’ he or she has committed an act of baseness or depravity contrary to accepted moral standards,” and noted that “this conclusion follows from Guerrero de Nodahl because the injurious act under [the statute] . . . must be willful, meaning that the person intended to cause the harm. Id. (discussing California Penal Code section 273.5).10 Grageda 10 Grageda’s view of the specific intent requirement of California Penal Code section 273.5 is arguably at variance with the California courts’ construction of that requirement, according to which the statute “requires only the mens rea of intending to do the assaultive act.” People v. Thurston, 71 Cal. App. 4th 1050, 1055 (1999). Guerrero de Nodahl, unlike Grageda, recognized that under California law, the term “willfully” “when applied to the intent to which an act is done . . . , implies simply a purpose or willingness to commit the act . . . . [and] does not require any intent to . . . injure another.” 407 F.2d at 1406 (internal quotation marks omitted). We held in Guerrero de Nodahl that regardless of the intent element, “inflicting cruel or inhuman punishment or injury upon a child is so offensive to American ethics that the fact that it was done purposely or willingly (the California definition of ‘willful’) ends debate on whether moral turpitude was involved.” Id. at 1406-07. As Grageda relied on Guerrero de Nodahl, the intent element asserted as inhering in section 273.5 could not have been determinative in Grageda. GALEANA-MENDOZA v. GONZALES 17427 and Guerrero de Nodahl, taken together, indicate that a special relationship can turn a crime involving violence into one involving moral turpitude. The two cases do not, however, establish that a special relationship alone suffices to turn a crime not necessarily involving violence or injury into one involving moral turpitude. Some — perhaps the majority — of batteries against the persons listed in section 243(e) will cause or be capable of causing injury, or will otherwise be so aggravated in nature that they can be characterized as “involving grave acts of baseness or depravity.” But some acts covered by section 243(e) simply cannot be so categorized. For example, throwing a cup of cola on the lap of someone to whom one is or had been engaged, slighting shoving a cohabitant, or poking the parent of one’s children rudely with the end of a pencil are all “offensive touching[s]” of qualifying individuals and can constitute domestic battery under section 243(e). None of these acts, however, can be characterized as inherently grave, base, or depraved. Adding to these acts an intent to commit them does not change that conclusion. See Mei, 393 F.3d at 741 (“If the crime is a serious one, the deliberate decision to commit it can certainly be regarded as the manifestation of an evil intent. Conversely, if the crime is trivial, even a deliberate intent to commit it will not demonstrate an intent so ‘evil’ as to make the crime one of moral turpitude.”); see also Rodriguez-Herrera v. INS, 52 F.3d 238, 240 (9th Cir. 1995). [8] We hold that, because it lacks an injury requirement and includes no other inherent element evidencing “grave acts of baseness or depravity,” California Penal Code section 243(e) does not qualify as a crime categorically involving moral turpitude.