Court Opinion

ID: 9452406
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-04 17:40:03.504759+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:33:12.487341
License: Public Domain

ELY, Circuit Judge
(dissenting):
I respectfully dissent. In its brief, the appellant concedes that “but for petitioner’s [appellee’s] misdemeanor conviction for indecent exposure, the superior court *1002would have lacked jurisdiction to proceed with his commitment as a mentally disordered sex offender.” The District Court has determined that the misdemeanor “conviction” was corrupted by the state’s denial to the accused of a right secured to him by the federal constitution. A valid conviction for the alleged misdemeanor could have resulted in a maximum period of confinement of only six months. Cal.Pen.Code § 19. It strikes me as unjust that the invalid “conviction” may nevertheless support, as an indispensable jurisdictional foundation, the confinement of appellee for a period which has already exceeded six years and which is of indefinite future duration. Adding to my concern is the fact that he is confined in a penal institution under state proceedings apparently conceived for the welfare of the mentally ill.
My Brothers emphasize Thurmond v. Superior Court, 49 Cal.2d 17, 314 P.2d 6 (1957), and In re Morehead, 107 Cal.App.2d 346, 237 P.2d 335 (1951). In neither of these cases, as the District Court correctly saw, did the California courts hold that “conviction” of a misdemeanor offense, eventually determined to have been wholly invalid, would afford the necessary jurisdictional foundation for a collateral psychopathic proceeding. In Thurmond it was held that the fact that sexual psychopathic proceedings were pending did not bar the accused of his right to move for a new trial in the criminal proceedings upon the result of which the psychopathic proceedings were based. The decision was confined to that which the District Court characterized as a “narrow procedural issue.” In More-head, California’s intermediate appellate court merely held that there was jurisdiction to proceed with a sexual psychopathic hearing even though the preceding misdemeanor convictions, because of pending appeal, had not become final. I agree with the district judge that when the court in Morehead stated that the “term ‘convicted’ * * * does not necessarily mean a final determination of guilt after an appeal has been taken,” it did not say, or mean to say, that the term included an invalid, constitutionally proscribed determination of guilt.
The majority reasons that there was “probable cause” for belief that appellee was a sexual psychopath. The California statute, however, required more than this. It permitted the judge to find “probable cause” only after the “person is convicted of any criminal offense * * As originally enacted in 1939, section 5501 permitted the determination of “probable cause” to be made after “any person is charged with a crime, either before or after adjudication of the charge * * #.” (Emphasis supplied.) When, by amendment of the statute in 1950, the California legislature changed the emphasized language to read “when a person is convicted of a criminal offense,” it obviously intended to create a more solid safeguard to liberty. Had a mere finding of “probable cause” by the magistrate been sufficient, the amendatory language would have been unnecessary.
In one of the latest expressions, in 1965, a California court has written that “conviction of a criminal offense is a sine qua non for [the psychopathic] procedure * * *.” In re Stoneham, 232 Cal.App.2d 337, 341, 42 Cal.Rptr. 741, 744 (1965). If “conviction” means “only the entry of a verdict of guilty,” it is not a very significant “sine qua non.” If such an entry were made without notice to the accused or pursuant to a plea induced by admitted coercion, would my Brothers still say that it would afford the jurisdictional “sine qua non” for a civil proceeding from which life imprisonment in a penal institution may result?
Upon the basis of the careful reasoning of the district judge, plus the few comments which I have added, I would affirm.