Court Opinion

ID: 9585539
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-21 23:01:29.153131+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T16:41:22.603436
License: Public Domain

RICHARDSON, J.*
I concur in the judgment affirming defendant’s conviction and remanding for resentencing.
I respectfully dissent, however, from the majority’s disapproval of People v. Thomas (1978) 20 Cal.3d 457 [143 Cal.Rptr. 215, 573 P.2d 433], and its analysis regarding the admissibility of evidence of prior crimes for the purpose of demonstrating a “common design or plan” on defendant’s part. Contrary to the majority’s assumption, the rule reaffirmed in Thomas (and applied in numerous earlier cases) allowed evidence of prior crimes not to establish defendant’s general “disposition” (i.e., habitual tendency) to commit sex crimes, but instead to prove that, because he recently committed substantially similar offenses in a distinctively similar fashion, he probably also committed the present offense. As we stated in an earlier case, the common design or plan exception to the general rule forbidding “disposition” evidence (see Evid. Code, § 1101, subd. (b)) applies where “there is some clear connection between that [prior] offense and the one charged so that it may be logically inferred that if defendant is guilty of one he must be guilty of the other.” (People v. Cramer (1967) 67 Cal.2d 126, 129-130 [60 Cal.Rptr. 230, 429 P.2d 582]; see Thomas at p. 465.)
In view of the fact that recently adopted Proposition 8 seemingly has eliminated the barriers to admissibility of relevant “prior crimes” evidence *97(see Cal. Const., art. I, § 28, subd. (d)), I will not devote too much effort to demonstrating the errors in the majority’s analysis in this pre-Proposition 8 case. Suffice it to say that where, as here, the victim’s consent to defendant’s sexual acts is at issue, the fact that defendant has committed several recent and strikingly similar nonconsensual sex offenses is highly relevant to the consent issue and was properly brought to the jury’s attention. (People v. Jackson (1980) 110 Cal.App.3d 560, 566 [167 Cal.Rptr. 915].)
As stated in Jackson, “Evidence of a prior offense is logically relevant to prove the defendant’s intent if the prior offense was sufficiently similar in its commission to the charged offense to indicate that the defendant probably harbored the same intent in both instances. [Citation.] [f] . . . Defendant’s trial theory, that the victim had consented to the sexual acts, was tantamount to a denial that he had intended to achieve [those acts] by force or intimidation. Evidence of prior offenses was thus admissible to establish defendant’s intent in the present offense by corroborating the victim’s testimony that she had not consented to the sex acts, so long as those prior offenses were not too remote and were similar to the offense charged. [Citation.]” (Ibid.)
Jackson’s rationale is fully applicable here and upholds the admission of evidence of defendant’s prior recent and similar sex offenses.

Retired Associate Justice of the Supreme Court sitting under assignment by the Chairperson of the Judicial Council.