Court Opinion

ID: 9785799
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-30 22:25:25.818389+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T07:36:02.296142
License: Public Domain

WERDEGAR, J., Concurring.
I concur in the result reached by the majority and in its conclusion that Penal Code section 12022.53,1 as written, allows imposition of more than one 25-year-to-life prison term enhancement for a single injury caused by use of a firearm. But unlike the majority, I believe the statute’s failure to conform punishment to culpability in this respect is likely the result of oversight rather than legislative intent. Rather than multiple life-term enhancements under section 12022.53, subdivision (d), both common sense and the overall scheme of the 10-20-life law suggest an assailant who shoots in the direction of several people, but injures only one of them, should receive only one 25-year-to-life enhancement for injuring one victim—while also being severely punished with multiple 20-year enhancements under section 12022.53, subdivision (c), for discharging a firearm in the commission of offenses against the remaining, uninjured victims. Nevertheless, I agree with the majority that no such restriction appears in the terms of section 12022.53 and that absent such an express limitation a trial court must impose as to each qualifying felony, and cannot strike, the longest section 12022.53 enhancement pleaded by the prosecution and found true by the trier of fact. (§ 12022.53, subds. (f), (h).)
In section 12022.53, the Legislature fashioned a carefully calibrated, if severe, system of additional penalties for use of a firearm in the commission of specified offenses. Simple use of a firearm, even if not operable or loaded, results in an additional term of 10 years in prison. (Id,., subd. (b).) If the defendant is found to have personally and intentionally discharged the firearm in commission of the offense, the enhancement is increased to 20 years. (Id., subd. (c).) Finally, if the shooting causes great bodily injury to anyone other than an accomplice in the crime, the statute imposes an extraordinary enhancement of 25 years to life in prison. (Id., subd. (d).) Under subdivision *1070(f) of the statute, “[o]nly one additional term of imprisonment under this section shall be imposed per person for each crime,” and if more than one enhancement is found true under the statute, the court shall impose the enhancement that provides the longest term of imprisonment. No other enhancement for firearm use or great bodily injury may also be imposed on the same count.
Section 12022.53’s graduated penalties (subds. (b)-(d)) and the limitation of one enhancement per person per crime (subd. (f)) suggest section 12022.53 enhancements were intended to correlate fairly closely with culpability. The interpretation we give the statute today—under which an injury to only one person may give rise to as many subdivision (d)“great bodily injury” enhancements as there were victims of all the underlying offenses—does not serve this purpose well. In the present case, for example, defendant’s punishment would best reflect his culpability were he to receive one subdivision (d) enhancement, for shooting and injuring victim Barrera, and one subdivision (c) enhancement, for firing his gun, as to each of the remaining attempted murders for which he was properly convicted.
By reserving section 12022.53’s most severe punishment for a defendant found to have injured, another by firing a gun, the Legislature clearly invoked the intuitive principle that appropriate punishment is to be measured in part by the harm the actor causes.2 Our holding today, that the “number of subdivision (d) enhancements imposed turns on the number of people defendant attempted to murder” (maj. opn., ante, at p. 1060), rather than the number he actually injured, is not fully consistent with this principle. That defendant shot in the direction of and thereby endangered several victims certainly makes his offense worse than that of an assailant who shoots at only a single victim. But that increased culpability would be fully punished by the additional attempted murder convictions and their appurtenant 20-year enhancements for defendant having discharged his weapon in commission of the attempted murders (§ 12022.53, subd. (c)). Under the court’s statutory reading today, defendant is treated the same as an assailant who shoots in the direction of, and hits, several victims, a result I do not believe the Legislature, in enacting section 12022.53’s graduated series of penalties, intended.
The drafters of section 12022.53, subdivision (d), however, did not limit its application to qualifying offenses involving great bodily injury to the victim of the underlying offense, but, rather, offenses in the commission of which the *1071defendant causes great bodily injury to “any person other than an accomplice.” Moreover, there may be circumstances—as when a qualifying offense has been committed against an uninjured victim but not the injured victim—in which imposing a subdivision (d) enhancement for injury to someone other than the victim of the underlying crime will best fit the punishment to the crime. The majority is thus probably correct that subdivision (d)’s specification that the injurious discharge of a firearm must have occurred “in the commission of’ the underlying qualifying felony was not intended to limit enhancements to cases where the victim in that felony sustained great bodily injury. Nor does any other language in the statute clearly limit the number of subdivision (d) enhancements that may be imposed based on a single gunfire injury.
For the reasons explained above, I suspect section 12022.53 was not meant to authorize imposition of multiple 25-year-to-life enhancements for a single instance of great bodily injury. For whatever reason, however, the Legislature failed to include any clear limitation to this effect in the statute. In such cases, this court is powerless to rewrite the law but must depend on the Legislature to clarify its intent.
Kennard, 1, and Moreno, J., concurred.
Appellant’s petition for a rehearing was denied July 14, 2004.

 All further statutory references are to the Penal Code.

 Though this “harm doctrine” has been called rationally indefensible (Kadish, Foreword: The Criminal Law and the Luck of the Draw (1994) 84 J. Grim. L. & Criminology 679, 684-695), it nonetheless enjoys “near universal acceptance in Western law” (id. at p. 679) and continues to inform our sense of criminal justice. (See, e.g., Payne v. Tennessee (1991) 501 U.S. 808, 819-825 [115 L.Ed.2d 720, 111 S.Ct. 2597].)