Six days after being sworn in as a Supreme Court justice, Justice Martin Jenkins participated in his first conference yesterday.  And it was a double one.  Besides rejecting a Golden State Warriors petition for review, other conference actions of note included:

  • In the first straight grant since October 21, the court agreed to hear People v. Ware.  The case might be renamed later, because the court denied two defendants’ petitions for review, granting only the petition filed by defendant Hoskins.  Even as to Hoskins, the court limited the issue to be decided:  “Does sufficient evidence support Hoskins’s Count 1 conviction for conspiracy to commit murder?”  When it earlier requested an answer to Hoskins’s petition, the court said the answer should address this issue in the petition:  “Whether a defendant may be convicted of conspiracy to commit murder where it was undisputed that the conviction was based entirely on circumstantial evidence of a conspiracy and his only connection to the coconspirators is common gang affiliation and social media posts which fail to prove his involvement in the conspiracy.”  The Fourth District, Division One, Court of Appeal, partially published opinion affirmed Hoskins’s conviction for conspiracy to commit murder.
  • The court denied review in In re Marriage of Siva, but it granted six requests to depublish the 2-1 opinion by the First District, Division Four.  The appellate court majority rejected an argument that the superior court had impermissibly modified a child support order retroactively by ordering one spouse to refund over $18,000 to the other spouse.
  • The court denied review and depublication requests in Mayron v. Google LLC, but Justice Goodwin Liu recorded a vote to hear the case.  The Sixth District’s opinion in the case concluded that there was no private right of action for violation of the automatic renewal law and that the plaintiff’s unfair competition claim failed for lack of standing because he didn’t allege an injury caused by the defendant’s conduct.
  • The court declined to hear Thurston v. Fairfield Collectibles of Georgia, LLC, but Justice Joshua Groban recorded a vote to grant the petition for review.  It was a personal jurisdiction case, where a divided Fourth District, Division Two, held in a partially published opinion that the plaintiff could sue in California a Georgia company for an alleged violation of California’s Unruh Civil Rights Act based on the alleged insufficient accessibility of the company’s website to blind users.  The majority held that because eight to ten percent of the company’s sales are to Californians, the “website is the equivalent of a physical store in California.”
  • In People v. Hautman, the Sixth District, in an unpublished opinion, ordered the superior court to determine whether the defendant had “participated in an electronic home detention program under [Penal Code] section 1203.018 and, if so, to calculate defendant’s conduct credit for time spent in that program.”  (Link added.)  The Supreme Court granted the defendant’s petition for review and directed the appellate court to reconsider “in light of Assembly Bill No. 1950.”  (Link added.)  The new legislation limits the length of probation terms.
  • The court granted review in Medina v. Superior Court and transferred the case back to the Fourth District, Division Three, which had summarily denied a writ petition.  The appellate court was directed to “issue an order to show cause why petitioner is not entitled to the relief requested, based on his claims that (1) the superior court improperly vacated the earlier finding of incompetence; (2) the superior court exceeded the scope of the Court of Appeal’s June 12, 2020 remand order [see here]; and (3) petitioner has been denied due process under the United States Constitution.”
  • There were 17 criminal case grant-and-holds:  11 more holding for a decision in People v. Lewis (see here); one more holding for People v. Lopez (see here); one more holding for both Lewis and Lopez; one more holding for In re Gadlin, which was argued in October (see also here and here); one more holding for In re Vaquera (see here); one more holding for People v. Esquivel (see here and here); and one more holding for People v. Garcia and People v. Valencia (see here).
  • The court dumped three civil grant-and-holds:  California Water Impact Network v. County of San Luis Obispo and Coston v. Stanislaus County (see here) were remanded for reconsideration in light of the court’s August decision in Protecting Our Water & Environmental Resources v. County of Stanislaus.  The court dismissed review in Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association v. Amador Water Agency (see here), which had been waiting for the August decision in Wilde v. City of Dunsmuir.