Court Opinion

ID: 9724525
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-26 11:00:17.512766+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T18:25:02.090864
License: Public Domain

POCHÉ, J., Dissenting.
In Austin v. Massachusetts Bonding & Insurance Co. (1961) 56 Cal.2d 596 [15 Cal.Rptr. 817, 364 P.2d 681], a unanimous opinion authored by Chief Justice Gibson, the California Supreme Court took pains to make clear that where an amendment to a complaint is filed after the statute of limitations has run “the amended complaint will be deemed filed as of the date of the original complaint provided recovery is sought in both pleadings on the same general set of facts.” (Id. at p. 600, italics added.) That sea change decision threw overboard cases that had set the standard variously as whether the amended pleading stated a new cause of action or a new legal theory or set forth a wholly different cause of action or a wholly different legal liability or obligation. The new simple-to-use same-general-set-of-facts standard was designed both to avoid the danger of narrow construction that other tests involved and to promote the policy of litigating cases on their merits. Nor was the Supreme Court bashful about *417what it was doing: it characterized the result as “the liberality of amendment permitted by the modern rule.” (At p. 603.)
In the case at hand Mr. Espinosa in his original complaint alleged that on or about May 7, 1983, various police officers of the City of Pittsburg beat him up, arrested him, jailed him and then went about destroying evidence of their attack on him. The amended complaint adds that three days later— i.e., May 10, 1983—the defendants also intimidated a witness to the beating of May 7 so that the witness was unable to testify at Espinosa’s trial for assault on the police officers. In other words, the destruction of evidence continued.
The majority holds that insofar as the amendment “relates to events after May 7” it is barred by the statute of limitations against all defendants. The announced reason is that the amendment refers to a different “accident,” “injury,” and “instrumentality.” (Majority opn., ante, p. 415, italics in original.) I reject the majority’s invitation to return to the thrilling and limiting tests of yesteryear. Accident, injury and instrumentality, whatever those terms may mean, suffer from the same vice that the Supreme Court in Austin saw in the tests they were repudiating, e.g., new cause of action, change of legal theory, a wholly different cause of action, or a wholly different legal theory or obligation. (Id. at pp. 600-601.) Our sole job here is to determine whether both pleadings arise out of the same general set of facts. Undeniably they do.
For this reason I would overrule the demurrer so that Mr. Espinosa can tell a jury not only about the beating and the destruction of evidence that are alleged in his original complaint to have occurred on May 7, but also about the events alleged to have taken place 72 hours or so later when the coverup and destruction of evidence continued in the form of intimidating a witness to the earlier events. To do otherwise perverts the plain meaning of the sole test given by the Supreme Court, runs absolutely counter to the policy of favoring litigation of cases on their merits and returns the system of justice to the hands of semanticists rather than juries, the position it held before Austin.