Stroud v. Superior Court

WERDEGAR, J., Dissenting.

The majority finds good cause to postpone a preliminary examination in the magistrate’s desire to attend a Judicial Council advisory committee meeting. I find no good cause, and therefore dissent.

Penal Code section 861 does not define good cause. It provides only that “[t]he preliminary examination shall be completed at one session or the complaint shall be dismissed, unless the magistrate, for good cause shown by affidavit, postpones it.” Lacking a definition, the statute unavoidably requires us to make a value judgment: Was it more important for the magistrate to stay in Los Angeles to finish the preliminary hearing in one session or to travel to San Francisco to discuss drug courts? In my view, the question is not close. The magistrate’s job—his reason for being a magistrate—is to hear and decide the cases assigned to him. We judges cannot allow this essential public responsibility to take second place to the internal affairs of the judicial branch.

Before today, it was understood that a judge’s desire to attend meetings, seminars, and conferences did not afford good cause to delay a trial. (See Lewis v. Superior Court (1981) 122 Cal.App.3d 494, 496-499 [ 176 Cal.Rptr. 80 ]; People v. Katzman (1968) 258 Cal.App.2d 777, 787-789 [ 66 Cal.Rptr. 319 ].) A fortiori, such events cannot afford good cause to postpone a preliminary hearing. When a case comes to trial, a magistrate has already *976 conducted a preliminary examination and found sufficient cause to believe the defendant has committed an offense. During the preliminary examination, however, a person charged with an offense is held on suspicion only. For this reason, the Legislature and the courts have jealously protected such a person’s right not to be imprisoned longer than necessary before cause has been found; thus the single-session rule set out in Penal Code section 861 and the requirement, absolute on its face, that the complaint be dismissed when the rule is violated. Such laws “are designed to protect the rights of the accused and to see to it that no one is detained in custody indefinitely or capriciously in order that a case may be developed in the future, or circumstances arise that will justify a trial. The interests of society do not demand, and the rights of the individual forbid, such an invasion of personal liberty.” (People v. Bucher (1959) 175 Cal.App.2d 343, 346 [ 346 P.2d 202 ].)

One can imagine committee meetings important enough to warrant postponing a preliminary hearing, such as the meetings that followed the Loma Prieta and Northridge earthquakes to consider how the affected courts in San Francisco and Los Angeles might be enabled to reopen for business. But nothing suggests the business of the Drug Court Advisory Committee on Friday, July 31, 1998, had that degree of urgency. The 13-member committee had already been meeting for two years. In July 1998, the committee had just been reappointed for a third year and charged with “providing to the Judicial Council by March 1, 1999, a report on its recommendations for the extension, expansion or replacement of the Drug Court Committee and its responsibilities.” (Judicial Council of Cal., Oversight Com. for the Cal. Drug Ct. Project, memo, to the Judicial Council, Mar. 10, 1999, p. 3.) As it turns out, the committee deemed it necessary to have an executive committee discuss the directive further at a weekend retreat in September. Under these circumstances, one cannot but conclude the magistrate’s attendance at the July meeting was less urgent than his remaining in Los Angeles to determine promptly whether sufficient cause existed to hold defendants over for trial.

Accordingly, I see no need for a detailed examination of the circumstances that influenced the magistrate’s decision to close his courtroom and travel to San Francisco. He should simply have reported to work on Friday and conducted the preliminary examination. The other 12 members of the committee could and would have carried on without him. If he chose, the magistrate could also have participated in part of the meeting by telephone. (Cf. Cal. Rules of Court, tit. 6, Jud. Admin. Rules, rule 6.33 (eff. Jan. 1, 1999).) In any event, like the judge who heard the motion to dismiss and presumably is far more conversant than this court with the practices of the Los Angeles County Superior Court, I attribute “no weight at all” to the magistrate’s assertion that the preliminary examination was originally estimated to require one and a half days, and the argument that the scheduling *977 conflict was therefore unavoidable, because the magistrate “did not [in] . . . five volumes of transcripts . . . ask counsel what the estimate was.” Indeed, the magistrate had no reason to ask because he mistakenly believed that closing his courtroom on Friday did not implicate the single-session rule.

Thus, assuming for the sake of argument the majority is correct that we review a finding of good cause to delay a preliminary hearing under the abuse of discretion standard (see maj. opn., ante, at pp. 968, 973), we still would not be able to uphold the postponement in this case because the magistrate below simply failed to exercise his discretion: He made no finding of good cause because he erroneously believed the statute did not apply. Nor, in any event, does the abuse of discretion standard adequately explain the majority’s conclusion. The majority writes that, “applying an abuse of discretion standard, we cannot lightly second-guess the magistrate’s own determination of the significance of the meeting.” (Maj. opn., ante, at p. 972, fn. 11.) To the contrary, we must set the limits of discretion to avoid fostering a system in which reviewing courts simply defer to magistrates’ subjective, idiosyncratic notions of good cause, however unimportant the conflicting demands on their time may be in comparison with the constitutional and statutory imperatives served by prompt, continuous preliminary hearings. Unless we have met our responsibility to declare the limits of discretion, the abuse of discretion standard is no standard at all.

Of the five judges who ruled on this matter before it came to this court, none concluded that the advisory committee meeting constituted good cause to postpone the preliminary examination. The magistrate, as mentioned, mistakenly believed that Penal Code section 861 did not apply during his absence. The judge who heard the motion to dismiss erroneously treated the day’s postponement as an interruption for “brief court matters” {id., subd. (c)) and thus found it permissible because the magistrate, over the entire course of the preliminary examination, had devoted the substantial majority of his time to the examination. The three justices of the Court of Appeal, who first squarely addressed the question of good cause, unanimously found no good cause and ordered the complaint dismissed subject to the People’s right to refile. We should do likewise.

Mosk, J., and Brown, J., concurred.