P v. Peoples & P v. Casares (Cal. Supreme): Two Death Penalty Affirmances

Death penalty opinions are often legally anodyne.  And this for a logical reason.  In most criminal cases, the state's high court has discretion whether to hear a case or not, reserving its docket for cases with legal issues that are novel or for which there exists a split of opinions in the lower appellate courts.  But death sentences must be heard by the high court, regardless of whether there are legitimate legal issues.  As a result, these opinions, while long and thorough, often contain no real new legal questions.  These are two such opinions.

Here Mr. Casares orchestrated a suppositious cocaine deal, then shot the seller in the head after stealing the product.  Mr. Peoples needlessly murdered multiple innocents during a crime spree.  Both opinions are long and thorough.  I do have one disagreement with Justice Lui in his Peoples' opinion.

The issue is whether the character and credibility of the trial judge is relevant to Peoples' arguments on appeal.  Justice Lui believes it is not.  I disagree.

The trial in Peoples took place in 1999 and 2000.  During the same time, the trial judge was ticket-fixing for family members of Eddie Guardado, then a pitcher for the Minnesota Twins who had once loaned the judge 3500 dollars which the judge failed to repay.  Despite not being the judge who would ordinarily hear ticket cases, he ordered court clerks (who admirably resisted) to dismiss the cases and to "keep this between us". The trial judge was also caught asking a fellow judge to O.R. an acquaintance that was in custody.  This behavior followed a "private" censure in 1997 by the judicial council for using his chambers to solicit money from attorneys and court staff.  In a subsequent disciplinary hearing, the trial judge claimed he did not believe it was unethical or illegal to order court clerks to dismiss cases not properly before him.

Justice Lui believes none of this is relevant to the question of whether Peoples' motion to disqualify the trial judge was improperly denied.  I cannot agree.  When a judge eagerly compromises the integrity of the bench for personal gain and then cannot admit he knew it was wrong to do so, that is relevant to whether that judge is competent to make the life-and-death decisions inherent in a death penalty case.  That he does it again after being warned, only to again feign gormless ignorance that his behavior is unethical and illegal, is embarrassingly relevant.

The judges' behavior (on the record) at Peoples' trial doesn't assuage one's anxiety about his judgment either.

"I specifically and without equivocation ordered counsel to be available for this case and this case only. And I don‘t care if it meant not eating, not sleeping, not taking a shit, it absolutely was to have been focused on this case for the entire time frame from the moment I made that order until the conclusion of the trial."

"To argue it so that [the jurors] are so god damned stupid that they cannot understand simple terminology. And I find offense to that. And assign no significant weight in argument to it. I have said it before, and I will say it again. If our system is so flawed because humans have their heads so far up their ass that they cannot understand the issues at hand in this case or these cases, then we should eliminate the jury system as a whole. 

Peoples' crimes were abhorrent and quite probably the result would have been the same had the case been before a more ethical and competent judge, but that doesn't mean the trial judge's legal and ethical deficiencies are irrelevant.  In judge-speak, "it goes to weight, not admissibility".