Court Opinion

ID: 9786019
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-30 23:45:19.393081+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T07:36:40.852446
License: Public Domain

*640BAXTER, J., Concurring.
I concur in the result. To convict one of the felony offense of making a criminal threat, the prosecution must prove several technical and stringent elements. One of these is that the threat must have been, “on its face and under the circumstances in which it [was] made,... so unequivocal, unconditional, immediate, and specific as to convey to the person threatened, a gravity of purpose and an immediate prospect of execution of the threat.” (Pen. Code, § 422, italics added.)
Applying the independent review standard proper for cases implicating First Amendment interests, I agree the evidence does not establish this specific element. The writing, in the form of a poem, that defendant handed to Mary S. and Erin S. said that the protagonist, “Julius AKA Angel,” “can be the next kid to bring guns to kill students at school.” (Italics added.) It did not say, in so many words, that defendant presently intended to do so. And the surrounding circumstances did not lend unconditional meaning to this conditional language.
That said, there is no question that defendant’s ill-chosen words were menacing by any common understanding, both on their face and in context. The terror they elicited in Mary S., and the concern they evoked in the school authorities, were real and entirely reasonable. It is safe to say that fears arising from a raft of high school shooting rampages, including those in Colorado and Santee, California, are prevalent among American high school students, teachers, and administrators. Certainly this was so on March 16, 2001, only eleven days after the Santee incident had occurred. That is the day defendant selected to press his violent writing on two vulnerable and impressionable young schoolmates who hardly knew him.
Defendant admitted at trial that he intentionally combined the subject matter and the timing for maximum shock value. Indeed, he acknowledged, his words would be interpreted as threats by “kids who didn’t know [he] [was] just kidding.”
Under these circumstances, as the majority observe, school and law enforcement officials had every reason to worry that defendant, deeply troubled, was contemplating his own campus killing spree. The important interest that underlies the criminal-threat law—protection against the trauma *641of verbal terrorism—was also at stake. Accordingly, the authorities were fully justified, and should be commended, insofar as they made a prompt, full, and vigorous response to the incident. They would have been remiss had they not done so. Nothing in our very narrow holding today should be construed as suggesting otherwise.