Court Opinion

ID: 9725435
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-26 11:47:45.008464+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T18:25:15.250166
License: Public Domain

NEWSOM, J.
I concur in the views so ably expressed in Justice Racanelli’s opinion. I would like to add, if only by way of emphasis, my view of why the conclusion we reach is the only one possible under the circumstances.
The central question before us is one of law. It is a question easily framed. Were the injuries to the victims Brown, Heffington and Reynolds, “bodily harm” within Penal Code section 209, justifying the imposition on two defendants of the penalty of life without parole? In passing upon that question we are not, as the dissent suggests, reweighing evidence or in any fashion invading the province of the trier of fact; rather, we are assessing whether, accepting the facts the trier found to be true, that evidence as a legal proposition establishes the physical injuries required for the impositon of life without parole.
These injuries have been described elsewhere in detail; they consist of a nosebleed (caused the victim by a kick from another child), fainting spells, nausea and stomachache.1
The surrounding emotional distress inflicted on the victims, obviously immeasurably more painful and damaging than these physical injuries injuries, has, of course, (because the Legislature has decreed it to be so) nothing whatever to do with the determination of whether “bodily injury” occurred, although it was obviously, and mistakenly, the pivotal *691point in the conclusions reached both by the trial judge and by my respected dissenting colleague.2 If the Legislature had intended us to consider emotional distress and psychic damage in determining whether bodily harm occurred, it could—it can and possibly should—say so. So far, it has not. I therefore decline absolutely to consider such factors in weighing the bodily harm question. I say this of course fully recognizing that the infliction of mental or emotional distress may be so atrocious as to deserve far more severe penalties than mere infliction of minor physical injury.
The statute permitting imposition of life without parole, upon a finding of mental and emotional trauma unaccompanied by significant physical injury, remains then to be written. It is no part of our function, acting out of abhorrence when confronted with this atrocious crime, to substitute our notion of what the law should be for what it plainly is. As a great ninteenth century judge warned, “It is the province of the Judge to expound the law only—the written from statutes, the unwritten. . . from the decisions of. . .predecessors and existing courts,... [and] not to speculate upon what is the best, in his opinion, for the advantage of the Community.”3
There are, as Justice Racanelli points out, sound pragmatic reasons why the Legislature has chosen not to permit the life without- parole sentence where no independent significant physical harm occurs. (People v. Daniels, supra, 71 Cal. 2d 1119; People v. Jackson, supra, 44 Cal.2d 511.) Manifestly the principal purpose was to provide an incentive for the kidnapper to refrain from inflicting such injury on the victim—a purpose which appears to have been vindicated in the circumstances of this case.4
The sentences of life imprisonment are unquestionably warranted, but I agree that we are required as a matter of law to strike the imposi*692tion of life without possibility of parole as clearly contrary to the legislative expression.
ELKINGTON, J.
I respectfully dissent from the opinions of my esteemed colleagues.
Our limited function is to determine whether, as a matter of law, the evidence that the kidnaped children were “subjected to bodily harm” was “substantial” or “insubstantial.” My colleagues have found it to be “insubstantial.”
The critical evidence is uncontroverted.
Many young and terrified school children on their way home in a school bus were, under threat of death or bodily injury by shooting, forced by defendants on a hot San Joaquin Valley summer afternoon into a tightly packed small van with about three and a half feet of headroom, and then into a pit consisting of a darkened and buried discarded furniture van. What we have variously, and aptly, described as the “nightmarish episode,” “agony,”* “fright,” “anxiety,” and “terror” of the young children continued for 28 hours. A medical witness opined that the ordeal was exacerbated by “temperature problems” and overcrowding, “breathing difficulties,” foul odor of body excreta, and fear of impending death.
During the course, and as a direct result, of this torment, some of the children, eight, nine and ten years of age, suffered abdominal pains, spontaneous nose bleeding, nausea, and fainting spells.
The trial court was persuaded beyond a reasonable doubt that the children had suffered bodily harm under Penal Code section 209. My colleagues conclude as a matter of law that they did not, for the reasons, among other things, that there was “no gross evidence” of significant injuries, that “trivial or insubstantial injury was not within the legislative contemplation in providing for the more serious penalty,” and that “such harm as was sustained by all of the victims in common was not the result of the intentional or gratuitous infliction of force upon the victims...
*693I think all would agree that, had defendants punched or kicked their young victims in their faces or abdomens, thus causing bloody noses and abdominal pains or other such trauma, they would have suffered bodily harm as intended by Penal Code section 209.
My mind rejects the argument that by inflicting such reasonably foreseeable injuries indirectly and by threat of death or bodily injury, under circumstances as here shown by the evidence, defendants’ crimes were somehow mitigated. Nor am I able to find legal or other authority supportive of such an argument.
I would affirm in its entirety what I perceive to be the errorless judgment of the superior court.
Respondent’s petition for a hearing by the Supreme Court was denied January 14, 1981. Richardson, J., was of the opinion that the petition should be granted.

 Abrasions of the knee and hand were found by the trial judge not to constitute “bodily harm.”

 With great respect for the learned trial judge—a jurist of experience and distinction—“suffering” is not what the statute (Pen. Code, § 209) is “all about.” The issue —to repeat—is whether substantial evidence of “bodily harm” as used in Penal Code section 209, and defined by our Supreme Court (cf. People v. Daniels (1969) 71 Cal.2d 1119 [80 Cal.Rptr. 897, 459 P.2d 225, 43 A.L.R.3d 677]; People v. Jackson (1955) 44 Cal.2d 511 [282 P.2d 898]), may be found in the evidence of this case, beyond a reasonable doubt.

 Chief Justice Coleridge in Egerton v. Brownlow (1854) 10 Eng.Rep. 359. As Bacon more succinctly puts it: “We are to declare, not make laws.” (Essays LVI.)

 That this was found to be so by the trial court appears probable from the judge’s statement at sentencing, ending with the following observation: “... those things have a tendency to indicate that the kidnappers were not simply completely indifferent to the welfare of the children.”

 The “agony” is ascribed to the children’s “families and friends” but the term will reasonably apply with greater force to the suffering of the children.