Court Opinion

ID: 9841330
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-09-21 22:10:36.315795+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T08:48:32.044348
License: Public Domain

Filed 9/21/23

                        CERTIFIED FOR PUBLICATION

                COURT OF APPEAL, FOURTH APPELLATE DISTRICT

                               DIVISION ONE

                           STATE OF CALIFORNIA

THE PEOPLE,                               D080779

       Plaintiff and Respondent,

       v.                                 (Super. Ct. No. FSB800199)

BRANDON PARKS BURNS,

       Defendant and Appellant.

       APPEAL from an order of the Superior Court of San Bernardino
County, Ronald M. Christianson, Judge. Affirmed.
       Law Offices of James Koester and James Jay Koester for Defendant
and Appellant.
       Rob Bonta, Attorney General, Charles C. Ragland, Assistant Attorney
General, Christopher P. Beesley and Michael Dodd Butera, Deputy Attorneys
General, for Plaintiff and Respondent.
      Consistent with common law tradition, California law creates varying
levels of culpability for homicide, including first and second degree murder,
voluntary manslaughter, and involuntary manslaughter. In People v. McCoy
(2001) 25 Cal.4th 1111 (McCoy), the Supreme Court concluded that
codefendants in the same homicide could have different levels of culpability
for the death, depending on their different mental states. Subsequent cases
have recognized that someone who aids and abets a homicide might have
greater or lesser responsibility for that result than the perpetrator. (See
People v. Samaniego (2009) 172 Cal.App.4th 1148, 1164 (Samaniego); People
v. Nero (2010) 181 Cal.App.4th 504, 518 (Nero).) In doing so, these later
cases criticized language in a standard jury instruction on aiding and
abetting liability, former CALCRIM No. 400, that told jurors “[a] person is
equally guilty of the crime, whether he or she committed the crime personally

or aided and abetted the perpetrator who committed it.” 1 (Italics added.)
These opinions warned that the “equally guilty” language of the instruction
might mislead jurors in some circumstances by suggesting that once they
decide the direct perpetrator is guilty of a particular crime (e.g., first degree
murder), the aider and abettor is necessarily guilty of the same crime,
regardless of his or her mental state. (Samaniego, at p. 1165; Nero, at
pp. 517–518.)
      In August 2010, after the decisions in both Samaniego and Nero,
defendant Brandon Parks Burns was convicted on one count of first degree
murder arising out of his participation with a codefendant in a gang-related
shooting. The jury in Burns’s case was instructed using the now-disapproved

1     The instruction has since been modified to read, “A person is guilty of a
crime whether he or she committed it personally or aided and abetted the
perpetrator.”
                                        2
version of CALCRIM No. 400, but his counsel did not argue that he was
guilty of a lesser crime than the codefendant. Neither did he assert
instructional error on appeal.
      In 2022, however, Burns filed a petition for resentencing under Penal

Code section 1172.6 2 (former section 1170.95), claiming he “could not
presently be convicted of murder . . . because of changes made to [sections]
188 and 189, effective January l, 2019.” He argued that based on the error in
former CALCRIM No. 400, the jury might have convicted him based on some
“other theory under which malice is imputed to a person based solely on that
person’s participation in a crime.” (§ 1172.6, subd. (a)(1).) This possibility,
he maintained, required that he be granted an evidentiary hearing. (Id.,
subd. (d).) The superior court disagreed and summarily denied his petition.
      Even accepting Burns’s legal argument regarding the flaw in the
earlier version of CALCRIM No. 400, the alleged error he identifies has
nothing to do with the 2018 and 2021 legislative changes that gave rise to
section 1172.6’s petition process. Section 1172.6 does not create a right to a
second appeal, and Burns cannot use it to resurrect a claim that should have
been raised in his 2013 direct appeal. Accordingly, we affirm the trial court’s
decision finding that Burns failed to establish a prima facie case for relief
under section 1172.6.

              FACTUAL AND PROCEDURAL BACKGROUND

      Burns and his codefendant Todd Tibbs were jointly tried for first degree
murder and attempted premeditated murder of two victims of two gang-
related shootings that took place within three weeks of each other. Initially,
both defendants were charged with the murder, but only Tibbs was charged

2     All undesignated statutory references are to the Penal Code.
                                        3
with the attempted murder. 3 A first trial ended in a hung jury on the
murder charges against both defendants, while Tibbs was found guilty of the
attempted premeditated murder. Before the retrial on the murder charges,
the prosecutor additionally charged Burns with the attempted premeditated
murder. Burns eventually pleaded guilty to that charge, and both defendants
proceeded to trial on the murder charge.
       In the middle of the second trial, Tibbs accepted an offer from the
prosecutor, agreeing to plead guilty to voluntary manslaughter as a lesser
included offense of murder. The jury ultimately convicted Burns of first
degree murder, finding true additional gang and firearm allegations.
(§§ 186.22, subd. (b), 12022.53, subd. (b).) We affirmed the judgment on
direct appeal. (People v. Parks-Burns (Jan. 11, 2013, No. D059348) [nonpub.
opn.].)
       In 2022, Burns filed a resentencing petition under section 1172.6,
seeking to vacate his murder conviction. The trial court denied the request
without a hearing, finding that he failed to establish a prima facie case for

relief. 4

3      Both parties’ briefs make reference to the factual summary in our
opinion deciding Burns’s 2013 direct appeal (People v. Parks-Burns (Jan. 11,
2013, No. D059348) [nonpub. opn.]) as an accurate reflection of material in
the trial court record. On our own motion, we take judicial notice of and
directly consider the record in that prior appeal, which is appropriate to
review in deciding whether a defendant has filed a facially sufficient petition.
(People v. Lewis (2021) 11 Cal.5th 952, 970 (Lewis).)
4      The court noted that McCoy, Samaniego, and Nero were all decided
before Burns filed his opening brief on direct appeal. In denying Burns’s
petition for relief, the court indicated that had it believed section 1172.6
applied to direct aiders and abettors of murder through the “other theory”
language in subdivision (a) of section 1172.6, it would have denied the
petition on the ground that the issue identified as the basis for relief should
                                        4
                                 DISCUSSION

      When reviewing the denial of a petition for relief under section 1172.6,
“[w]e independently review a trial court’s determination on whether a
petitioner has made a prima facie showing.” (People v. Harden (2022) 81
Cal.App.5th 45, 52 (Harden).) Relying on the since-discarded “equally guilty”
language in the former version of the CALCRIM No. 400 jury instruction that
was provided to his jury, Burns argues he may have been convicted of murder
based on an “[imputation] of the direct murder perpetrator’s malice mens rea
to an aider and abettor defendant without necessarily determining that
individual’s personally held malice aforethought.” He cites to language in
section 1172.6 as amended by Senate Bill No. 775 in 2021, which extended
the availability of statutory relief beyond convictions based on the felony
murder rule and the natural and probable consequences doctrine (neither of
which concededly were at issue in Burns’s case) to any “other theory under
which malice is imputed to a person based solely on that person’s
participation in a crime.” (§ 1172.6, subd. (a)(1).)
      Burns contends that the misleading former version of CALCRIM
No. 400 created, in effect, an “other theory” of imputed malice within the
meaning of section 1172.6. But in focusing exclusively on subdivision (a)(1),
Burns ignores the fact that he was entitled to an evidentiary hearing only if
he made a prima facie showing of all three conditions listed in subdivision (a)

have been raised on direct appeal from the conviction but had not been so
raised. Instead, it disagreed with Burns’s proffered interpretation of the
“other theory” language of section 1172.6, subdivision (a)(1), concluding that
a direct aider and abettor to murder is not entitled to relief under section
1172.6 as a matter of law. It reasoned that language extending relief to
persons convicted under any “ ‘other theory under which malice is imputed to
a person based solely on that person’s participation in a crime’ ” refers to a
crime other than murder.
                                        5
of the statute. The third of those conditions requires that Burns “could not
presently be convicted of murder or attempted murder because of changes to

Section 188 or 189 made effective January 1, 2019.” 5 (§ 1172.6, subd. (a)(3),
italics added.)
      As numerous courts have recognized, the petition process created by
former section 1170.95 (now § 1172.6) was designed to permit the
resentencing of defendants who were properly convicted under the law that
applied at the time, but “could no longer be convicted of murder” because of
recent legislative changes. (People v. Vargas (2022) 84 Cal.App.5th 943, 950;
accord Lewis, supra, 11 Cal.5th at p. 959 [“section [1172.6] provides a
procedure for convicted murderers who could not be convicted under the law
as amended to retroactively seek relief”]; Harden, supra, 81 Cal.App.5th at
p. 47 [“section [1172.6] provides an avenue for those convicted before these
statutory changes became effective to receive the benefits of the new
legislation”]; see also People v. Flores (2020) 54 Cal.App.5th 266, 272; People
v. Farfan (2021) 71 Cal.App.5th 942, 952; People v. Estrada (2022) 77
Cal.App.5th 941, 945.) A petition thus supplements a defendant’s traditional
direct appeal by providing an opportunity to make arguments that did not
exist at the time of the appeal, but have arisen since 2019 as a result of
recent statutory amendments. The problem Burns raises in his petition,
however, has nothing to do with the legislative changes to California’s
murder law effected by Senate Bill No. 1437 (2017–2018 Reg. Sess.) and
Senate Bill No. 775 (2021–2022 Reg. Sess.). Accordingly, he did not satisfy
the section 1172.6, subdivision (a)(3) condition as part of his required prima
facie showing. (See People v. Antonelli (2023) 93 Cal.App.5th 712, 721.)

5     In Lewis, supra, 11 Cal.5th 952, 972, footnote 6, the Supreme Court
noted that it was not required in that case “to resolve what is substantively
required under [section 1172.6,] subdivision (a)(3).”
                                       6
      Indeed, all the case law on which Burns relies was decided well before
the jury verdict in his trial. (Samaniego, supra, 172 Cal.App.4th at p. 1164;
Nero, supra, 181 Cal.App.4th at p. 518.) His remedy for any alleged
instructional error that affected the verdict was his appeal from the judgment

of conviction. 6 His failure to raise the argument on direct appeal forfeited
that claim (cf. In re Dixon (1953) 41 Cal.2d 756, 759), and the subsequent
petition process created by the Legislature when it enacted Senate Bill
No. 1437 did nothing to change the applicable law so as to resurrect an

argument he had already abandoned. 7
      Burns views the legal landscape differently. Relying by analogy on the
Supreme Court’s analysis in People v. Strong (2022) 13 Cal.5th 698, he
contends we must “consider the elemental changes to the murder statutes
occasioned by [Senate Bill No.] 1437 and [Senate Bill No.] 775 and how those
subsequent changes affect the determination of the possible prejudice now
stemming from the equally guilty language utilized in then CALCRIM
No. 400.” But the flaw in Burns’s argument lies in its premise that at the

6     Even had he made such an argument on appeal, there were no
questions from the jury (Nero, supra, 181 Cal.App.4th at p. 518) or other
“exceptional” circumstances (Samaniego, supra, 172 Cal.App.4th at p. 1165)
to suggest a prejudicial error that would have required reversal.
7      Although acknowledging that “cases are not authority for issues not
addressed,” Burns nonetheless points to People v. Langi (2022) 73
Cal.App.5th 972 and People v. Maldonado (2023) 87 Cal.App.5th 1257 as
examples of decisions in which appellate courts reversed a trial court’s denial
of a section 1172.6 petition at the prima facie stage and did not find
forfeiture. In both cases, however, the defendant’s trial and direct appeal
took place before there was any suggestion in the case law that there was a
problem with the applicable jury instructions. Nor is there any indication the
opinions considered the effect of the language in subdivision (a)(3) of section
1172.6 requiring that defendants show they can no longer be convicted
“because of” the recent legislative changes.
                                       7
time of his trial, the idea that a “direct perpetrator’s culpability could be
imputed to an aider and abettor” represented a “legally viable theory of aider
and abettor murder liability,” and that the amendment to the law occasioned
by Senate Bill No. 1437 “changed that legal viability.” Because the premise
fails, so too does the conclusion. The Supreme Court’s McCoy decision, as
explained and developed in Samaniego and Nero, made clear that the direct
perpetrator’s mental state could not be imputed to an aider and abettor,
whose mental state had to be independently evaluated. (McCoy, supra, 25
Cal.4th at p. 1121; Samaniego, supra, 172 Cal.App.4th at pp. 1164–1165;
Nero, supra, 181 Cal.App.4th at pp. 517–518.)
      The problem with the “equally guilty” language in former version
CALCRIM No. 400 was not that it permitted the jury to rely on a now-invalid
theory of criminal liability, but that it may have misled the jury as to what
was required to convict Burns under a theory of criminal liability that was
unaffected by Senate Bill No. 1437 and Senate Bill No. 775. Use of the
“equally guilty” language in the instruction provided at Burns’s trial created
a potential issue of instructional error, but it did not operate to offer the jury
a theory of legal liability that can no longer support a conviction for murder
as a result of the recent statutory changes. If Burns believed that the trial
court in his case prejudicially erred by instructing the jury using the then-
current version of CALCRIM No. 400, he had every basis and opportunity to
raise that issue on his direct appeal. Because recent enactments “did not
change accomplice liability for murder under direct aiding and abetting
principles” (People v. Jenkins (2021) 70 Cal.App.5th 924, 931; see People v.
Gentile (2020) 10 Cal.5th 830, 848), Burns is not entitled to relief.

                                         8
                              DISPOSITION

     The order denying the petition for resentencing is affirmed.

                                                          DATO, Acting P. J.

WE CONCUR:

DO, J.

KELETY, J.

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