It’s time again (actually, past time) to look at how the California Supreme Court fared at the U.S. Supreme Court during the latter’s most recent term, which ended last month. There was no direct review of any of the state court’s work, but there were some notable high court/California Supreme Court-related actions.
Here are some of those actions.
PAGA arbitration. The two certiorari denials in Uber Technologies v. Gregg and Lyft v. Seifu are worth mentioning not because of California Supreme Court opinions in the cases (there weren’t any), but because they directly implicated another case in which the California court did issue an opinion. Gregg and Seifu had been grant-and-holds in the California Supreme Court, which later dismissed review without opinions. However, the issue raised in the cases gave the U.S. Supreme Court the chance to disapprove the California Supreme Court decision in Adolph v. Uber Technologies, Inc. (2023) 14 Cal.5th 1104, an opinion holding that the U.S. Supreme Court had misinterpreted California law about the viability of representative actions under the Labor Code’s Private Attorneys General Act when representatives’ individual claims are being arbitrated (see here). The Gregg and Seifu cert denials left Adolph untouched. See: U.S. Supreme Court won’t review PAGA arbitration cases. Horvitz & Levy filed the Seifu cert petition.
Unconstitutional taking. The U.S. Supreme Court’s opinion in Sheetz v. County of El Dorado (2024) 601 U.S. 267 found fault with a published Third District Court of Appeal decision that the California Supreme Court had declined to review. Unlike the Third District, the federal high court held a fee imposed on a landowner by legislation was “an unlawful ‘exaction’ of money under the Takings Clause” no less than a fee imposed on an ad hoc basis by administrators.
University student discipline. Cert was denied in Boermeester v. Carry, where the California Supreme Court held a private university student did not have a right to cross-examine witnesses at a disciplinary hearing that preceded his expulsion from the school (Boermeester v. Carry (2023) 15 Cal.5th 72; see here). Horvitz & Levy represented the defendants in both Supreme Courts.
Sixth Amendment/sentencing. The U.S. Supreme Court also denied cert in Catarino v. California. In People v. Catarino (2023) 14 Cal.5th 748, the California Supreme Court ruled that a statute requiring full-term consecutive prison sentences for certain sex crimes found by a judge to have been committed “on separate occasions” does not offend the Sixth Amendment right to a jury trial. (See here.)
Bitemark testimony. When cert was denied in McCrory v. Alabama, Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote a concurring statement favorably noting both the California Supreme Court’s opinion in In re Richards (2016) 63 Cal.4th 291 and the statutory change that led to it. The Richards court granted habeas corpus relief from a murder conviction that had been based in part on bitemark testimony by a dental expert that, post-conviction, had been recanted by the expert himself and discredited by other experts based on newly available computer technology. (See here and here.) McCrory, too, involved a murder conviction based on discredited bitemark evidence. Justice Sotomayor said she agreed not to hear McCrory’s case because “due process claims like McCrory’s have yet to percolate sufficiently through the federal courts.”
Death penalty affirmance. A cert petition was also unavailing in Miranda-Guerrero v. California. The California Supreme Court affirmed the death sentence in People v. Miranda-Guerrero (2022) 14 Cal.5th 1. (See here.)
Related:
“We believe in the value of precedent,” Chief Justice says in her State of the Judiciary Address