California v. Hernandez
Annotate this CaseIn 1995, defendant-appellant Hermando Antonio-Vega Hernandez pled guilty to burglary in violation of Penal Code section 4591 on facts that included his entering a convenience store and stealing $18 of beer. He was sentenced to two years in prison. When California voters passed Proposition 47 in 2014, they enacted section 459.5, which defined the new offense of shoplifting as any theft of property valued at $950 or less from a commercial establishment during business hours and which required that any such offense be charged as misdemeanor shoplifting, not felony burglary. Proposition 47 also allowed defendants to file petitions to recharacterize prior felony convictions that would have been misdemeanors under the law as changed by the initiative. In 2017, relying on that provision, defendant filed a petition seeking to have his felony burglary conviction designated as misdemeanor shoplifting in violation of section 459.5. The trial court denied the petition, because, based on police reports in the trial court record, it found defendant entered the store with the intent to commit robbery in violation of Penal Code section 211, rather than merely with the intent to commit a low-value theft. The Court of Appeal reversed, finding that after Proposition 47, an offense was shoplifting, not burglary, if it involved “entering a commercial establishment with intent to commit larceny while that establishment is open during regular business hours, where the value of the property that is taken or intended to be taken does not exceed nine hundred fifty dollars ($950). . . . no one who is charged with shoplifting may also be charged with burglary or theft of the same property.”
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