Court Opinion

ID: 9745274
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-26 22:45:29.614845+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T07:24:58.546938
License: Public Domain

WOODS (Fred), J., Concurring.
Although I fully join in the court’s opinion, I believe the Boykin/Tahl/Yurko error requires additional comment.
The district attorney is responsible for filing and proving criminal charges. In the overwhelming number of cases, more than 90 percent, those charges are proved not by evidence at trial but by eliciting a defendant’s guilty plea and admission.
How to elicit such guilty pleas and admissions has been expressly prescribed for over 25 years. (Boykin v. Alabama (1969) 395 U.S. 238 [23 L.Ed.2d 274, 89 S.Ct. 1709]; In re Tahl (1969) 1 Cal.3d 122 [81 Cal.Rptr. 577, 460 P.2d 449].) The necessity to advise a defendant of his rights to jury trial, confrontation, and not to incriminate himself—has not changed. (People v. Howard (1992) 1 Cal.4th 1132, 1175 [5 Cal.Rptr.2d 268, 824 P.2d 1315].)
When the district attorney is asked to elicit a valid guilty plea or admission, as was done here and is commonly done, the trial court and the People have a right to expect this simple, routine duty will be competently discharged. Failure to competently discharge that duty, as here, disserves the administration of justice and wastes precious, increasingly scarce resources.
The district attorney has a duty to train his deputies how to competently perform simple tasks involved in nine of every ten cases he handles.
A petition for a rehearing was denied April 17, 1996, and appellant’s petition for review by the Supreme Court was denied May, 22, 1996.