Court Opinion

ID: 9940187
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2024-02-13 17:16:52.304985+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T13:42:40.226571
License: Public Domain

I dissent.
The declaration requirement in juvenile "wobbler" cases (Welf. Inst. Code, § 702) was enacted in order to facilitate determination of the limits on any present or future commitment to physical confinement. Where the record explicitly reflects the court's commitment of a juvenile to the maximum felony term of confinement on a wobbler offense, the limits are clearly determinable and there is no risk of confusion in subsequent adjudications that the offense had been deemed a felony, as opposed to a misdemeanor. In such instances, it serves no useful purpose to additionally require a formal utterance that the offense is a felony.
This is such a case, and then some. In the underlying proceedings, Manzy W. admitted allegations contained in a juvenile wardship petition charging him with felony possession of a controlled substance in violation of Health and Safety Code section 11377, subdivision (a), and with "joyriding" in violation of Penal Code section 499b. These allegations were found true by the juvenile court. Before committing Manzy, the court considered a probation department report stating that the maximum term of physical confinement for possession of a controlled substance as a felony was three years and that the maximum term for joyriding was one month. The recommendation of the report, however, was to commit Manzy to a lesser, nonfelony-length period of confinement of 75 days at Shasta County Juvenile Hall "with discretion given to the probation officer" for an earlier release or furlough if appropriate. After hearing objections from Manzy's mother, the juvenile court opted to reject the department's recommendation and instead committed Manzy to the Youth Authority for the maximum felony confinement period of three years for the possession offense and one month for the joyriding offense.
As Justice Mosk previously and so cogently stated under circumstances similar to these, "I deem it a redundant exercise, in the face of this record, to send the matter back to the trial judge merely to require him to recite again, this time by incantation in the words of the statute, a conclusion that he has previously reached and substantially related." (In re KennethH. (1983) 33 Cal.3d 616, 622 [189 Cal.Rptr. 867, 659 P.2d 1156] (dis. opn. of Mosk, J.).)
In the matter before us, Justice Mosk leads the charge in the opposite direction, adhering blindly to prior decisions which uncritically assumed that *Page 1213 
trial judges are unfamiliar with wobbler offenses, that judges do not know when the criminal offenders who appear before them are charged with wobblers, and that judges are unaware of their discretion to treat such offenses as either felonies or misdemeanors. (E.g., In re Kenneth H., supra, 33 Cal.3d 616;In re Ricky H. (1981) 30 Cal.3d 176 [178 Cal.Rptr. 324,636 P.2d 13]; In re Dennis C. (1980) 104 Cal.App.3d 16
[163 Cal.Rptr. 496].) Those assumptions find no support in the law and are patently unreasonable. More importantly, there is no evidence that the Legislature subscribed to such notions or that the statute was intended to remedy a perceived problem supposedly caused by ignorant judges. For these reasons I believe Justice Mosk's previous assessment of the issue was the correct one.
By committing Manzy to the maximum three-year felony period of confinement despite the probation department's recommendation of a lesser nonfelony term, the juvenile court made plain its conclusion that it deemed the possession offense to be a felony rather than a misdemeanor. Since further clarification of the instant record is unnecessary and serves no legitimate purpose, I would dispense with a remand to the juvenile court. *Page 1214