The opinion and dissent in this case are unusual. Unusual because they are authored by the same justice. Yes, Justice Blease writes an opinion affirming the denial of Mason's motion to set aside the indictment. But Justice Blease does not agree with the California Supreme Court's controlling cases and while his opinion follows these cases, he dissents from his own opinion, noting that while he is "bound" by the higher court's decisions, he is not "gagged" by them. This is one worth reading.
In the summer of 2012, Mr. Mason, his family, and his dog, joined some friends at a swimming hole at the bottom on a deep granite canyon. When everyone was out of the swimming hole, Mason lit an illegal firework and tossed it into the water. Unfortunately the firework launched sparks 27 feet in the air which landed on some dry vegetation and started a fire. Mason tried to put out the fire, but couldn't. The fire spread and burned 2,650 acres of land, including a cabin. While fighting the fire, a fireman broke his arm. Mason later gave a tearful confession.
The prosecutor wanted Mason for arson, with enhancements for the fireman's broken arm and the cabin. A magistrate dismissed the arson charges, instead holding Mason to answer for the lesser offense of recklessly causing the fire. The prosecutor then took the case before a grand jury and obtained an indictment for the arson charges. Mason moved the court to set aside the indictment. The trial court denied Mason's motion whereupon Mason filed a petition for a writ of mandate.
The central issue, raised via a claim of improper instruction of the grand jury, is the proper mental state requirement for arson, PC 451. Specifically, the mental state required for the third of three acts prohibited by the arson statute.
It is arson to [1] set fire to, [2] burn, or [3] cause to be burned, any structure, forest land or property. These three clauses define the prohibited acts under the arson statute, but what is the required mental state that must accompany the act(s)? According to two California Supreme Court opinions written by Justice Chin, the mental state required for act [3] is an intent to do the act that causes the burning, accompanied by an objective knowledge that the direct, natural, and highly probable consequence of such act is the burning of a structure, forest land, or property. This is where Justice Blease believes the California Supreme Court has gone off the rails. Blease's interpretation is that since arson is a general intent crime, and a general intent crime requires an intent to do the prohibited act, the intent required for arson under act [3] is an intent to cause a structure, forest land, or property, to be burned.
Blease's dissatisfaction with Chin's imaginative editing of PC 451 has some history. Blease authored In re Stonewall F. (1989) 208 Cal. App. 3d 1054, in which two youths lit some leaves on fire, the fire eventually burning a school building. That opinion held arson was a general intent crime, requiring an intent to do the prohibited act, causing the burning of the school building. Since the youths did not intent to cause the school building to burn, they lacked the required mental state.
A decade on, another panel of the Third District (which did not include Justice Blease), used Stonewall F. to reverse a trial court's exclusion of evidence of voluntary intoxication in the case of People v. Atkins (1999) 88 Cal. Rptr. 2d 176, reversed and ordered depublished. Since voluntary intoxication evidence can be admitted to negate specific (not general) intent, this holding was erroneous. The California Supreme Court granted review and reversed with Justice Chin writing the opinion, People v. Atkins (2001) 25 Cal. 4th 76.
Instead of simply saying voluntary intoxication evidence is irrelevant in relation to general intent crimes, arson is a general intent crime, and therefore Atkins must be reversed, Chin, for some reason, sought to create an issue where there really was none, and then through an unnecessarily long and tortured juggling of legal issues, created a new crime out of whole cloth. Justice Chin unconvincingly changed the actus reus from "cause the burning of a structure, forest land, or property" (explicit in PC 451) to the "act that causes" the burning of a structure, forest land, or property.
As arson is a general intent crime, meaning the required intent is that to do the prohibited act, when Chin changed the actus reus, he necessarily changed the required intent. No longer does arson require an intent to cause property to burn, rather it just requires the intent to do the act that causes the property to burn. If an automobile driver flicks a cigarette butt out the window and starts a forest fire, the test for whether he was guilty of arson would not be whether he intended to cause the forest to burn, but only whether he intended to flick the butt.
But a problem with redefining the actus reus this way is that it makes arson a crime of strict liability. So the California Supreme Court, via judicial fiat, shoehorned into the mental state an additional requirement of objective knowledge that doing the "act that causes" will directly, naturally, and highly probably, cause a structure, forest, or property to burn.
Justice Blease believes the California Supreme Court has made an unnecessary mess of the arson statute. He believes that his opinion in Stonewall F. was the correct interpretation of PC 451 and he uses his dissent to so say. And his legal reasoning is pretty convincing.
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