The Supreme Court today holds a murder victim’s sister could not sue the Department of Mental Health for failing to petition under the Sexually Violent Predators Act for the commitment of the murderer before his parole from prison. In State Department of State Hospitals et al. v. Superior Court, the court concluded that, although the lawsuit’s allegations established the Department violated a mandatory statutory duty in the way it conducted its evaluation of the murderer, any wrongdoing by the Department was not the proximate cause of the death. The court affirms the Second District, Division Three, Court of Appeal.
All seven justices agreed with the result, but there was a division regarding the reasoning. The majority opinion — written by Justice Carol Corrigan and concurred in by Chief Justice Tani Cantil-Sakauye and Justices Ming Chin and Mariano-Florentino Cuéllar — found that, in addition to a weak showing of “but for” causation, “policy considerations bearing on the question of proximate cause are also a considerable obstacle to plaintiff’s claim.” A concurring opinion by Justice Kathryn Werdegar, signed by Justices Goodwin Liu and Leondra Kruger, criticizes the majority’s reliance on policy considerations, stating that “[t]he majority cites no public policy stating the outcome of a discretionary decision may not form part of the chain of events a tort complaint hypothesizes as what would have happened but for the defendant‘s breach of duty.”
In a second opinion filed today — in People v. Charles — the court unanimously affirms a death penalty judgment. The decision, authored by Justice Werdegar, rejects claims, among others, that there shouldn’t have been a fourth penalty phase trial, that the trial court erroneously admitted a jailhouse letter written by the defendant, and that there was prosecutorial misconduct.