Court Opinion

ID: 9557483
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-21 16:51:05.8503+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T09:05:53.137224
License: Public Domain

MOSK, J.
I concur in the judgment of the majority. I also join in Justice Chin’s concurring opinion. As he notes, our decision in this case establishes only that Penal Code section 969a (further statutory references are to this code) authorizes postverdict amendments of an information or indictment before the jury has been discharged.
I write separately to point to a further limitation in our holding. In their discussion of the due process issues implicated by their construction of section 969a, the majority state: “[A]s the omission of priors from the information in this case was apparently due to a clerical error, we need not decide whether it would be permissible for a prosecutor intentionally to delay *610charging prior felony conviction enhancement until after the verdict. Such a prosecutorial decision would raise additional issues of statutory interpretation, as well as ethical considerations not presented on the facts of this case. Moreover, such a prosecutorial decision obviously carries the potential to have an unfair and detrimental impact on an accused’s trial tactics and wouldf, therefore,] change significantly the evaluation of the due process issue.” (Maj. opn., ante, at p. 607, original italics.)
I disagree with the implication of the majority that the lawfulness of deliberate prosecutorial delay in charging prior felony convictions is an open question. Apart from either ethical or due process considerations, such deliberate delay is outside the scope of section 969a, and is therefore not authorized by statute. A key word in this statute is discovered. The amendment of an information can occur under section 969a only when “it shall be discovered that a pending indictment or information does not charge all prior felonies of which defendant has been convicted . . . .” (Italics added.) As the legislative history reviewed by the majority makes clear, what the drafters of section 969a had in mind primarily was the situation in which a prosecutor belatedly discovers a defendant’s prior felony convictions after an indictment or information has been filed. The majority hold, correctly, that section 969a will also apply when the prosecutor belatedly discovers that a prior felony conviction allegation has been omitted from the information or indictment through clerical error. But the inescapable inference of the phrase “[w]henever it shall be discovered” in section 969a is that it only applies when prior felony conviction charges have been unintentionally omitted and that omission is later “discovered”; in other words, postindictment or postinformation discovery is the act that triggers the authorization to amend. A prosecutor who deliberately delays charging the prior felony cannot be said to have “discovered” that the prior conviction charges were omitted after the filing of the original information, and an amendment pursuant to such an intentional withholding of prior felony allegations cannot be authorized by section 969a.