The Supreme Court today affirms the death penalty in People v. Mendez for a gang member’s 2000 fatal shooting of a 14-year-old girl and a 16-year-old boy in Colton. Among a number of other things, the court’s unanimous opinion by Justice Mariano-Florentino Cuéllar avoids ruling on the merits of two Sanchez issues concerning a gang expert’s testimony, finding waiver of one argument and lack of prejudice regardless of error as to another.
The court also rejects a challenge to the reading during the trial’s penalty phase of a poem the girl victim had written as a fifth grader, that included the lines, “Everyone is killing each other, not knowing all the pain and hurt they’re going to make or all the souls they are going to take./ I don’t know about you, but I’ve had enough./ They’re taking innocent lives./ It could be your brothers, your sisters, your wives, or maybe even you.” The court says, “that [the] poem bemoaned gang violence may have injected a cruel irony into the proceedings. But we fail to see how, under our precedents, that irony invited an irrational response from the jury.”