California v. Bratton
Annotate this CaseAt age 16, defendant Tory Bratton confessed to robbing a local market, with an accomplice, shooting the clerk dead, and taking $184. At his trial, his counsel argued that defendant’s confession was false and that he did not participate in the robbery at all. However, trial counsel did not argue that, even if defendant did participate, he was not the shooter. Defendant was convicted of (among other things) first degree murder, with a personal firearm use enhancement and felony-murder special circumstances. He appealed; the Court of Appeal affirmed. When defendant filed a petition to vacate the murder conviction under Penal Code section 1172.6, the trial court denied it; it ruled that the Court of Appeal's opinion in defendant’s direct appeal showed that he was the actual killer. The State conceded that this was error, but that the error was harmless because the record of conviction established defendant was the actual killer. Anticipating this response, defendant argued that, under standard principles of issue preclusion (a/k/a collateral estoppel), preclusion did not apply here because: (1) Whether defendant was the shooter was not actually litigated; (2) Trial counsel had an incentive not to contest whether defendant was the shooter; (3) The significance of whether defendant was the shooter was small at trial but, due to the then-unforeseeable enactment of section 1172.6, has since become great; (4) Section 1172.6 was a significant change in the law that warranted reexamination of whether defendant was the shooter. The Court of Appeal agreed that standard principles of issue preclusion applied here. However, the Court held that the issue of whether defendant was the shooter was actually litigated. Moreover, trial counsel did have an incentive to contest this issue; evidently, he simply made a tactical decision not to. Because trial counsel did have an incentive to contest the issue, it did not matter that it was unforeseeable that the issue would have additional future consequences. And finally, while section 1172.6 was a significant change in the law, the Legislature intended that it not constitute an exception ipso facto to issue preclusion.
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