(CN) — The California Supreme Court ruled that a recently enacted right to have gang enhancement charges tried separately from the underlying criminal charges doesn't apply retroactively.
In a split decision issued Monday, the state's top court overturned an appellate court that had agreed with a convicted member of a street gang that he was entitled to a bifurcated trial on the gang allegations under Assembly Bill 333, also known as the STEP Forward Act, that went into effect in 2022 while his appeal was pending.
Chief Justice Patricia Guerrero, writing for the majority, said that while normally amendments to the criminal code that call for less severe punishment are applied retroactively, in this case the change in law applied to trial procedures and not to sentencing factors.
"There is no question that the legislative findings accompanying Assembly Bill 333 reflect significant concerns about gang enhancements in general, including about their usefulness in stemming crime and their disproportionate impact on people of color in particular," Guerrero said.
"However, we do not discern from these findings a ‘clear and unavoidable implication’ that the Legislature intended Assembly Bill 333’s bifurcation provisions to apply retroactively."
Francisco Burgos was part of a group who identified themselves as members of a Crips street gang when they robbed two men outside a convenience store in San Jose at gunpoint after asking them where they were from and whether they "banged," a reference to "gang banging."
Burgos was charged with second-degree robbery and additional gang and firearm enhancements, which increase the potential sentence a defendant faces if convicted. Burgos and the other defendants unsuccessfully sought a bifurcated trial on the gang enhancements, and he ended being sentenced to 21 years in prison.
According to his court filings, the aim of the amendment to have the gang enhancement tried separately from the underlying charges is to address the "systemic racism in the criminal justice system that has adversely impacted people of color."
He argued that without facing a trial on both the substantive criminal charges and the gang enhancement, prosecutors will need to extend more reasonable plea offers for a defendant to accept it and that a bifurcated trial is less likely to result in a conviction on the substantive charge or conviction only on a lesser charge.
Associate Justice Kelli Evans said in the dissent by two of the court's seven judges that placing the choice whether to bifurcate proceedings involving a gang enhancement in the defendant’s hands represented a sea change in how gang cases are tried.
Courts for the sake of efficiency denied bifurcation even when admission of the gang evidence would have been excluded as “unduly prejudicial” in the trial on the non-gang offenses, according to Evans.
"This unfairness was of profound concern to the Legislature," Evans wrote. "In clear and forceful language, the Legislature found and declared that 'gang enhancement evidence can be unreliable and prejudicial to a jury because it is lumped into evidence of the underlying charges which further perpetuates unfair prejudice in juries and convictions of innocent people.'”
An attorney for Burgos didn't immediately respond to a request for comment on the ruling.
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