Court Opinion

ID: 9748414
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-27 16:01:13.42873+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T07:25:35.100819
License: Public Domain

WILLHITE, J., Concurring.
I concur in the opinion. I write separately to emphasize three points.
First, it is apparent from the record that the trial court, the prosecutor, and trial defense counsel assumed that in the severed court trial on the charge of felon in possession of a firearm, the court would not be conclusively bound *1561by a jury verdict of acquittal in the trial of the other charges. Indeed, that was the core assumption of the bargain the court struck in granting the severance motion—appellant received the benefit of the severance, preventing the jury from learning that he was a convicted felon; in exchange, he submitted to the court’s unrestricted judgment in a separate nonjury trial on the charge of being a felon in possession of a firearm. This core assumption, however, was not made an express condition of the severance and of appellant’s jury waiver on the charge of being a felon in possession of a firearm. Had such an express condition been imposed and agreed to by appellant, I would conclude that appellant waived the collateral estoppel effect, under Ashe v. Swenson (1970) 397 U.S. 436, 443 [25 L.Ed.2d 469, 90 S.Ct. 1189] (Ashe), of the jury’s verdict.
Second, even with such an express waiver, the type of procedure attempted here—a jury trial on some charges arising from a single incident, with no collateral estoppel effect on a severed nonjury trial on a remaining charge arising from the same incident—is problematic. The jury’s verdict of acquittal in such an arrangement is a final determination, “in the sense that no further judicial act remains to be done to end the litigation” on the charges to which the acquittal applies. (People v. Scott (2000) 85 Cal.App.4th 905, 919 [102 Cal.Rptr.2d 622].) But it is only after such a verdict that one can know the full extent of collateral estoppel effect created by the verdict." As stated in Ashe: “The federal decisions have made clear that the rule of collateral estoppel in criminal cases is not to be applied with the hypertechnical and archaic approach of a 19th century pleading book, but with realism and rationality. Where a previous judgment of acquittal was based upon a general verdict, as is usually the case, this approach requires a court to ‘examine the record of a prior proceeding, taking into account the pleadings, evidence, charge, and other relevant matter, and conclude whether a rational jury could have grounded its verdict upon an issue other than that which the defendant seeks to foreclose from consideration.’ The inquiry ‘must be set in a practical frame and viewed with an eye to all the circumstances of the proceedings.’ [Citation.]” (Ashe, supra, 397 U.S. at p. 444, fh. omitted.) In my view, the uncertainty in the breadth of collateral estoppel effect inherent in the Ashe analysis makes the type of severance procedure contemplated here unwise.
Finally, should any court in the future contemplate severance under an arrangement like that contemplated here (though I do not recommend it), the court should ensure that (1) the defendant is expressly advised that a jury verdict of not guilty on one or more of the charges, and the factual findings inherent in that verdict, might well be binding on the court in its determination of the remaining charge arising out of the same incident, and
*1562(2) the defendant expressly agrees that regardless of whether the jury acquits him on one or more of the charges it determines, and regardless of the factual findings implicit in the jury’s verdict of acquittal, the court may nonetheless make different factual findings and convict him of the charge the court determines.