Court Opinion

ID: 9693878
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-25 17:06:31.834874+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T15:10:53.191143
License: Public Domain

Filed 8/24/23 P. v. Williams CA2/1
   NOT TO BE PUBLISHED IN THE OFFICIAL REPORTS
California Rules of Court, rule 8.1115(a), prohibits courts and parties from citing or relying on opinions
not certified for publication or ordered published, except as specified by rule 8.1115(b). This opinion
has not been certified for publication or ordered published for purposes of rule 8.1115.

IN THE COURT OF APPEAL OF THE STATE OF CALIFORNIA

                         SECOND APPELLATE DISTRICT

                                        DIVISION ONE

 THE PEOPLE,                                                            B321615

           Plaintiff and Respondent,                                    (Los Angeles County
                                                                        Super. Ct. No. NA065871)
           v.

 ROBERT VINCENT WILLIAMS,

           Defendant and Appellant.

      APPEAL from an order of the Superior Court of
Los Angeles County, James D. Otto, Judge. Affirmed.
      John Steinberg, under appointment by the Court of Appeal,
for Defendant and Appellant.
      Rob Bonta, Attorney General, Lance E. Winters, Chief
Assistant Attorney General, Susan Sullivan Pithey, Assistant
Attorney General, Kenneth C. Byrne and Allison H. Chung,
Deputy Attorneys General for Plaintiff and Respondent.
       In 2007, a jury convicted Robert Vincent Williams and a
codefendant of murder and other crimes. In 2020, Williams filed
a petition for resentencing under Penal Code section 1172.6.1
The court held an evidentiary hearing on the petition and found
beyond a reasonable doubt that Williams “is guilty of murder as
a direct aider and abettor with the intent to kill.”
       Williams contends that the evidence is insufficient to
support the court’s finding. He also contends that evidence
of his codefendant’s jail telephone calls was inadmissible
at the evidentiary hearing on his petition, and that the court
erroneously failed to consider his youth at the time of his murder
as a mitigating circumstance. We reject his contentions and
affirm the court’s order.

           FACTUAL AND PROCEDURAL SUMMARY
      A.      The 2007 Trial
      In April 2007, the People charged Williams and
codefendant, Keith Lee Jones, in a second amended information
with the murder of Michael Green (§ 187, subd. (a)), having a
concealed firearm in a vehicle (former § 12025, subd. (a)(1)), and
carrying a loaded firearm while being an active participant in a
criminal street gang (former § 12031, subd. (a)(2)(C)). The People

      1 Subsequent unspecified statutory references are to the
Penal Code.
       Williams filed his petition for resentencing under former
section 1170.95, which the Legislature later renumbered
section 1172.6 without substantive change. (Stats. 2022, ch. 58,
§ 10.) We hereafter cite to section 1172.6 for clarity and ease
of reference. (See People v. Reyes (2023) 14 Cal.5th 981, 986
(Reyes).)

                                2
also alleged certain gang and firearm enhancements (§§ 186.22,
subd. (b)(1)(A), 12022.53, subds. (b)–(e)(1)). The People further
alleged that Williams had a prior strike conviction and served
a prior prison term for purposes of section 667.5, subdivision (b).
      Williams and Jones were tried together before a single
jury in 2007. The evidence at that trial included the following:
      Williams, Jones, Kassiem Warnick, Michael Sanders, and
Kalup Hartley are members of the Rolling 20s Crips, a street
gang in the Long Beach area. Williams’s gang moniker is Young
Technique, or Tech. The Rolling 20s are rivals of the Insane
Crips, another Long Beach area street gang.
      On the night of April 9, 2005, Michael Green was on a front
porch outside the home of brothers Lionel and Lamar Jacobs on
Olive Avenue in Long Beach near the intersection with 20th
Street.2 Lionel was an Insane Crips member and Lamar was
associated with that gang.
      Three or four men walked toward the Jacobs’s residence
from across the street carrying guns. The men called out Rolling
20s slogans and began firing their weapons toward the house.
Green was fatally shot. One bullet hit Green in the face, severing
his jugular vein. A second bullet penetrated Green’s hip; the
coroner recovered a fragment of that bullet.
      Police officers recovered numerous nine-millimeter and
.40-caliber shell casings from the area near the murder scene.

      2 Because Lionel and Lamar Jacobs share the same last
name, we will refer to them by their first names. We intend no
disrespect.

                                 3
      A woman who lived on 20th Street near the Jacobs’s home
testified that on the night of the murder she “heard a barrage
of shots,” then saw three men running from Olive Avenue to an
alley behind her home. She saw one person with a gun and heard
a “muddled argument” among the men, and “someone saying,
‘you’re a fool,’ or, ‘hey, fool,’ or something like that.” The men got
in a car in the alley and drove away.
      In the course of the police investigation, detectives recorded
interviews with Lamar, Michael Wright, and Hartley. The
prosecution played the recordings to the jury during the trial.
      Lamar told the detectives he was on the front porch of his
house with Green and two others on the night Green was killed.
He saw Williams, Jones, Sanders, and Warnick walk toward
the house with guns in their hands. As they approached, they
“yell[ed] out” Rolling 20s gang slogans. Lamar turned and began
to run around the side of his house to the back. Moments later
he heard a volley of gunshots followed by a second volley. When
the gunfire stopped, Lamar returned to the front yard and saw
that Green had been shot. Lamar picked Williams’s photo from
a photo array and stated, “ ‘That’s Tech [Williams]. I saw him
approach [Green] with a gun in his hand.’ ”
      Wright told detectives that he was outside the Jacobs’s
residence talking with Green, Lamar, and others on the
evening of Green’s murder. Wright saw an older white Cadillac
drive up 20th Street past the residence twice and then park a
short distance from the residence. Moments later he saw Jones,
Sanders, and a third young black man he could not identify, each
holding a handgun, walk toward them from across the street.

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Jones stopped in the middle of the street, pulled out a black
semiautomatic handgun, and fired it. Wright ran down the street
while others ran into the Jacobs’s backyard.
      Hartley told police that on the day of Green’s murder,
he was in the back seat of a sports utility vehicle (SUV) driven
by Jovan Barber. Jones and Sanders were also in the vehicle.
Barber drove past the Jacobs’s residence a few times, then
parked the SUV in an alley off Olive Avenue. Williams soon
pulled up behind them in a light-colored car with Warnick as
his passenger. Jones and Barber got out of the SUV, joined
Williams and Warnick in the alley, and walked away. Hartley
and Sanders remained in the SUV. Moments later Hartley heard
about 10 gunshots fired not far away. About a minute later,
Williams, Jones, and Barber returned to the alley. Hartley heard
another shot and seconds later Warnick appeared in the alley.
The men got into the cars they arrived in and drove away.
      On April 16, 2005—one week after Green’s murder—
Los Angeles County Sheriff ’s Department deputies observed
Warnick throw a gun into a trash can at a park. The deputies
recovered a loaded Beretta .40-caliber semiautomatic handgun
from the trash can. Ballistics testing revealed that the gun
had fired the .40-caliber shells found at the Green murder scene.
      On May 24, 2005, a police officer observed Williams driving
a new white Mustang with Barber in the front passenger seat.
Later that day, police officers received a report that a passenger
in a new white Mustang fired a gun in front of a residence on
Pasadena Avenue near 20th Street in Long Beach. At the scene

                                 5
of the shooting, officers recovered three shell casings from the
curb in front of the residence.
      Approximately an hour after the gunfire on Pasadena
Avenue, police officers conducted a traffic stop of a new white
Mustang at 20th Street and Long Beach Boulevard. Williams
was the driver of the Mustang; Jones was the front passenger;
and Barber was in the backseat. A search of the Mustang
revealed a .38 caliber Colt revolver hidden in the driver’s side
of the center console and a loaded black Firestar semiautomatic
nine-millimeter handgun in the passenger’s side of the center
console. The police arrested the three men.
      Ballistics tests showed that the bullet fragment recovered
from Green’s hip, all seven nine-millimeter shell casings found at
the Green murder scene, and the three shell casings found at the
shooting on Pasadena Avenue earlier that day had all been fired
from the Firestar handgun found in Williams’s car.
      After Jones’s arrest, police recorded telephone
conversations he made from jail. Jones referred to Hartley
“getin’ down on [him]” and how “that crushed [his] heart.” Jones
stated that police found “no fingerprints” on the guns found in
“the car.” In one call, Jones stated that there were multiple
witnesses identifying him at the scene and one person saying
he was a shooter, but that he “didn’t shoot at all.” Jones told
another caller he had “dirt” on Lamar and Lionel Jacobs that he
could use against them at trial, and complained that “the homies,
they like snitching and stuff.”
     The jury found Williams guilty on each count, found
the murder to be in the first degree, and found true each of the

                                  6
gang and firearm enhancement allegations. In a bifurcated
proceeding, Williams admitted the prior strike and prison term
allegations. The court sentenced him to prison for 120 years to
life.
      Williams appealed and, in 2009, this court modified the
judgment to correct certain sentencing errors, and affirmed the
judgment as modified. (People v. Williams (March 27, 2009,
B203616) [nonpub. opn.].)

      B.    Williams’s 2020 Petition for Resentencing
       In November 2020, Williams filed a facially sufficient
petition in the trial court for resentencing under the predecessor
to section 1172.6.3 He also requested the court to appoint counsel
to represent him. The court thereafter appointed counsel, set
a briefing schedule, and set a hearing to determine whether
Williams made a prima facie showing for relief.
       In October 2021, Williams’s appointed counsel filed a
second petition for resentencing under section 1172.6. The
court ordered the petition consolidated with Williams’s pending
November 2020 petition.

      3 In his resentencing petition, Williams describes his
sentence as 120 years to life. His counsel on appeal and the
Attorney General also refer to his sentence as such. Our 2009
opinion, however, reduced Williams’s sentence to 75 years to life.
We directed the trial court to prepare new abstracts of judgment
reflecting these changes and to forward them to the Department
of Corrections and Rehabilitation (DCR). Although it is not clear
from our record that the court prepared and transmitted the
new abstracts to the DCR, we presume that the superior court
officials performed their duty. (Evid. Code, § 664.)

                                7
       On January 25, 2022, the court found that Williams had
made a prima facie case for relief under section 1172.6 and set
an evidentiary hearing.
       At the evidentiary hearing held on May 19, 2022, the
People submitted without objection the reporter’s transcripts
of the 2007 trial and one volume of the clerk’s transcript filed
in Williams’s direct appeal.4 The clerk’s transcript includes the
transcripts of the recorded police interviews of Lamar, Wright,
and Hartley, and the jail calls by Jones that were played to the
jury in the 2007 trial. Neither the People nor Williams offered
any additional evidence.
       On June 1, 2022, the court denied the petition, finding
that the People “have met their burden beyond a reasonable
doubt of proving to the [c]ourt that [Williams] is guilty of murder
as a direct aider and abettor with the intent to kill.”
       Williams timely appealed.

                          DISCUSSION
      At an evidentiary hearing held pursuant to section 1172.6,
the prosecution has the burden of proving “beyond a reasonable
doubt, that the petitioner is guilty of murder . . . under
California law as amended by [Senate Bill No. 1437].” (§ 1172.6,
subd. (d)(3).) Although the law as amended by Senate Bill
No. 1437 now precludes liability for murder based upon the
natural and probable consequences doctrine (Reyes, supra, 14

      4 We granted the People’s unopposed motion for judicial
notice of the record in People v. Williams, supra, B203616, which
includes the reporter’s transcripts of the 2007 trial. The People
also transmitted electronic copies of the reporter’s transcripts to
this court.

                                 8
Cal.5th at p. 986) and narrowed the scope of the felony murder
rule (People v. Strong (2022) 13 Cal.5th 698, 708), a defendant
who is not the actual killer can still be guilty of murder as a
direct aider and abettor of the actual killer. (People v. Gentile
(2020) 10 Cal.5th 830, 848 (Gentile).) “ ‘Under a direct aider
and abettor liability theory, the prosecution must prove the
person who is not the actual killer “engaged in the requisite
acts [actus reus] and had the requisite intent [mens rea]” to
aid and abet the target crime of murder.’ [Citation.] A direct
aider and abettor’s ‘guilt is based on a combination of the direct
perpetrator’s acts and the aider and abettor’s own acts and
own mental state.’ [Citation.] ‘ “The aider and abettor doctrine
merely makes aiders and abettors liable for their accomplices’
actions as well as their own. It obviates the necessity to
decide who was the aider and abettor and who [was] the direct
perpetrator or to what extent each played which role.” ’ ” (People
v. Williams (2022) 86 Cal.App.5th 1244, 1252.)
       We review the trial court’s denial of a section 1172.6
petition after an evidentiary hearing for substantial evidence.
(Reyes, supra, 14 Cal.5th at p. 988; People v. Vargas (2022)
84 Cal.App.5th 943, 951.) “Under this standard, we review the
record ‘ “ ‘in the light most favorable to the judgment below to
determine whether it discloses substantial evidence—that is,
evidence which is reasonable, credible, and of solid value—such
that a reasonable trier of fact could find the defendant guilty
beyond a reasonable doubt.’ ” ’ ” (Reyes, supra, at p. 988.)
       Here, the evidence submitted to the court at the
evidentiary hearing included the testimony given at Williams’s
2007 trial and the recordings of the police interviews of Lamar
and Hartley. In Lamar’s police interview, he told detectives that

                                9
Williams was one of four members of the Rolling 20s gang—a
rival of Lamar’s gang, the Insane Crips—who approached his
house with guns in hand yelling Rolling 20s slogans. Moments
later, as Lamar fled, volleys of bullets were fired and Green was
fatally shot. Hartley also identified Williams as one of the four
men who walked together from a nearby alley that night and,
after shots were fired, returned together to their cars and fled.
The nine-millimeter semiautomatic gun that fired at least one
of the bullets that hit Green was fired from a gun later found
in Williams’s car. Even if the evidence does not establish that
Williams was a person who actually shot Green, the evidence
is sufficient to support the court’s reasonable inferences that
the Rolling 20s gang member who did shoot Green acted with
the intent to kill, that Williams shared that intent, and that his
participation in the shooting aided and abetted the actual killer.
(See People v. Campbell (1994) 25 Cal.App.4th 402, 409–410
[in determining whether defendant aided and abetted a
crime, relevant factors are defendant’s presence at the scene,
companionship with the perpetrator, and concerted action
before and after the offense]; see also People v. Burgos (2022)
77 Cal.App.5th 550, 559–560 [same]; In re Juan G. (2003) 112
Cal.App.4th 1, 5 [same].)
       Williams highlights the fact that neither Hartley nor
Lamar actually saw Williams fire a gun. Williams points out
that Hartley was sitting in Barber’s SUV in the alley when the
shooting took place; thus, he “did not witness the shooting and
could not identify the perpetrator or perpetrators.” And although
Lamar identified Williams as a person who “ ‘approach[ed]
[Green] with a gun in his hand,’ ” Williams states that Lamar
“failed to establish [Williams’s] role in the shooting” and he “did

                                10
not see the shooting or identify the perpetrator or perpetrators.”
Substantial evidence, however, is not limited to direct evidence;
it “encompasses circumstantial evidence and any reasonable
inferences to be drawn from such circumstantial evidence.”
(People v. Lopez (2013) 56 Cal.4th 1028, 1070.) As set forth
above, the court could reasonably infer from the totality of the
evidence that Williams was a direct aider and abettor of Green’s
murder.
       Williams also contends that the transcripts of the
recordings of Jones’s jail calls are inadmissible under the
Aranda/Bruton5 rule. Under that rule, a statement by one
codefendant that implicates another codefendant is inadmissible
in a joint trial; if the multiple-defendant case is not severed, the
statement must be either redacted to eliminate references to the
implicated codefendant or excluded. (People v. Holmes, McClain
and Newborn (2022) 12 Cal.5th 719, 749.)6
       Williams did not object to the admission of the transcripts
at the evidentiary hearing and has therefore forfeited the
argument on appeal. (See People v. Valdez (2012) 55 Cal.4th

      5 Bruton v. United States (1968) 391 U.S. 123; People v.
Aranda (1965) 63 Cal.2d 518.
      6 At the outset of the 2007 trial, the prosecution indicated
it intended to introduce recordings of Jones’s jail calls. The
court asked whether there would be any “Aranda issues.” The
prosecutor told the court that there are no such issues because
any statements the prosecution would use would “be sanitized”
of incriminating statements against Williams. Excerpts of
certain recordings of Jones’s calls were thereafter introduced in
the 2007 trial over Williams’s Aranda/Bruton objection. In his
direct appeal, Williams did not assert any error with respect to
the use of Jones’s calls.

                                 11
82, 130; Evid. Code, § 353.) Even if the argument had been
preserved for appeal, Williams has failed to point to any
statement in the transcripts of Jones’s jail calls that implicates
Williams. Nor has our review of the record revealed any such
statement. Accordingly, the Aranda/Bruton rule has no
application here. 7
       Williams further argues that the evidence is insufficient
to show that he “was the actual killer.” The court, however,
did not find that Williams was the actual killer, and the court’s
denial of the petition did not require that finding. As discussed
above, a defendant may be guilty of murder under the law after
the enactment of Senate Bill No. 1437 if he is a direct aider and
abettor of the actual killer; he need not be the actual killer.
(Gentile, supra, 10 Cal.5th at p. 848.) This is the finding the
court made, and that finding is supported by substantial
evidence.
       Williams next contends that the court failed to consider his
alleged “youth”—he was 22 years old at the time of the murder.
Williams points to the fact that the court’s order denying his
petition “did not address [his] youth as a mitigating factor[ ].”
Williams does not cite to any authority requiring the court to
address particular facts or factors explicitly in an order denying
a section 1172.6 petition. To the extent the court was required to

      7 Williams argues that, if his trial counsel failed to preserve
the Aranda/Bruton issue for appeal, he was deprived of the
effective assistance of counsel. Because we reject on the merits
the contention that the introduction of the jail call transcripts
violated the Aranda/Bruton rule, counsel was not deficient for
failing to object on that ground and, even if counsel was deficient,
Williams has not shown that he was prejudiced as a result.

                                 12
consider Williams’s age, “we presume the trial court followed
the law in exercising its duties and duly considered the evidence
presented to it,” and the failure to “mention certain evidence [in
its ruling] does not mean that the court ‘ignored’ that evidence.”
(People v. Jones (2022) 86 Cal.App.5th 1076, 1092.) Moreover,
Williams asserted his youth argument in his written brief in the
trial court, and the court, in its order denying the petition, stated
that it had considered the parties’ briefs and arguments. For
all these reasons, we reject Williams’s contention that the court
failed to consider his argument that his youth is a mitigating
factor.
                          DISPOSITION
      The order denying Williams’s petition for resentencing is
affirmed.
      NOT TO BE PUBLISHED.

                                            ROTHSCHILD, P. J.
We concur:

                   CHANEY, J.

                   WEINGART, J.

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