At its first Wednesday conference in three weeks (the gap between conferences is because of the late-May and the June oral argument calendars the last two weeks), the Supreme Court today granted review in a case concerning a plaintiff’s ability to sue a public entity for child molestation by an entity employee. A 4-3 court last August found untimely a plaintiff’s similar claim in Rubenstein v. Doe No. 1. The new case — Big Oak Flat-Groveland Unified School District v. Superior Court — raises a different issue: whether the plaintiff had to comply with the defendant school district’s claim presentation requirement when the Legislature has exempted her childhood sexual abuse case from the State’s claim presentation requirement. The Fifth District Court of Appeal ruled against the plaintiff in a published opinion.
Other conference actions included:
- The court agreed to hear yet another Proposition 47 case, People v. Liu. The 2014 initiative, which reduces punishment and allows resentencing for certain crimes, has been a regular on the court’s calendar. (Just recently, see, e.g., here, here, here, and here.) In Liu, the Second District, Division Eight’s published opinion dealt primarily with application of the Supreme Court’s opinions in People v. Page and People v. Romanowski, and it mostly upheld the denial of a resentencing petition.
- The court granted review in People v. Foster, a Proposition 47-adjacent case. There, the Fourth District, Division One held in an unpublished opinion that a civil commitment as a mentally disordered offender after serving a prison sentence for a felony could not be dismissed based on the later reduction of the felony to a misdemeanor under Proposition 47.
- The court also granted review in Weiss v. People ex rel. Department of Transportation, an inverse condemnation and nuisance case. In a published opinion, the Fourth District, Division Three disagreed with a 2007 Court of Appeal decision by the Second District, Division Two, and held an eminent domain statute was inapplicable to inverse condemnation actions.
- The court depublished the Second District, Division Four opinion in Klean W. Hollywood, LLC v. Superior Court. The Court of Appeal there held that a drug abuse treatment facility could not be liable for injuries to a patient from injecting heroin he had smuggled into the facility. The depublication order came in conjunction with the plaintiff’s withdrawal of his petition for review.
- The court issued an order to show cause in a death penalty habeas corpus proceeding, exercising its discretion under Proposition 66 to retain the matter, while farming out the petition to the superior court for fact finding. One issue the Supreme Court wants decided is whether the petitioner is intellectually disabled and thus ineligible for execution. The court vacated a death sentence on intellectual disability grounds just last month.
- In two criminal cases, the court granted review and transferred the matters back to the Court of Appeal. In one of those cases, it was a second transfer order.
- The court made grant-and-hold orders in three criminal cases.
- The court dismissed review in or transferred back to the Court of Appeal 21 criminal cases. Many were grant-and-hold matters, but two of the dismissals — People v. Padilla and People v. Mendoza — came in fully briefed cases raising juvenile-life-without-parole issues. The court had previously asked for briefing about the effect on the two cases of recent legislation.