People v. Chun

California has no nonstatutory crimes: criminal liability must be authorized by statute. But statutory terms, especially terms borrowed from the common law, can require judicial interpretation. Section 188’s phrase “abandoned and malignant heart” is itself broad and has long been judicially construed to define implied malice.

Second degree felony murder does not eliminate malice as an element of murder. Rather, it supplies a distinct form of implied malice when a defendant commits a felony inherently dangerous to human life. Society’s designation of such conduct as felonious provides notice of its life-threatening character, allowing the law to impute malice without separately proving that the defendant actually acted with conscious disregard for life.

The court rejected the suggestion that the Legislature abolished the common law rule when it recodified the manslaughter statute in 1872. The earlier 1850 statute’s felony-related proviso was best understood as limiting involuntary manslaughter, not as the sole source of felony murder. Nothing in the 1872 codification, its accompanying notes, or early California decisions showed an intent to eliminate felony murder.

Thus, the common law understanding incorporated in section 188’s “abandoned and malignant heart” language includes second degree felony murder. Because the doctrine rests on that statutory language, it does not violate separation-of-powers principles.

The Ireland merger doctrine prevents the prosecution from using a felony that is an integral part of the homicide as the predicate for second degree felony murder. Its central purpose is to prevent the felony-murder rule from bypassing the jury’s consideration of malice in the large class of killings produced by felonious assaults.

The court found its prior merger decisions impossible to reconcile. People v. Hansen had treated a section 246 violation as categorically nonmerging, while People v. Robertson and People v. Randle applied a fact-specific inquiry asking whether the defendant had an independent or collateral purpose, such as an intent to frighten rather than injure.

Neither approach provided a satisfactory rule. The Hansen approach gave no principled basis for treating section 246 differently from closely related offenses. The Robertson-Randle collateral-purpose test created the anomaly that a person who claimed merely to frighten a victim could face felony-murder liability while a person who intended to shoot the victim could not. It also converted merger from a legal question into a disputed factual question about the defendant’s purpose, without a clear mechanism for having the jury resolve that question.

The court adopted an elements-based rule: all felonies that are assaultive in nature merge with a resulting homicide. An assaultive felony is one involving a threat of immediate violent injury. If the elements of an offense contain an assaultive aspect, it merges even if the offense can also be committed through nonassaultive conduct. This rule avoids fact-dependent merger determinations and accords with the court’s instruction that second degree felony murder should not be extended beyond its necessary application.

Section 246, which prohibits willfully and maliciously firing at an occupied vehicle, is plainly assaultive. The trial court therefore erred by instructing the jury that Chun could be convicted of second degree felony murder on that predicate. The court expressly overruled Hansen to the extent it supplied a different test, disapproved People v. Tabios, overruled Robertson, and overruled Randle’s reasoning while preserving Randle’s result.

The court rejected the argument that the jury lacked a valid malice theory because the trial court did not give the standard CALJIC instructions specifically labeled for express or implied malice murder. The court did give CALJIC No. 8.11, which required an unlawful killing with malice or during the predicate felony and fully defined implied malice as an intentional act dangerous to life, deliberately performed with knowledge of danger and conscious disregard for human life.

The jury’s acquittal on the separately charged section 246 offense strongly suggested that it did not rest the murder conviction solely on felony murder. But the verdicts were internally difficult to reconcile, and inconsistent verdicts can result from compromise, leniency, or confusion. The acquittal alone therefore could not establish harmlessness beyond a reasonable doubt.

The evidence nevertheless made the error harmless. Any juror who used the felony-murder theory necessarily found that Chun willfully participated, either as a shooter or aider and abettor, in firing at an occupied vehicle. The vehicle held three people, all were struck at close range, and the shots came from multiple firearms. No juror could find Chun participated in that shooting without also finding that he intentionally committed a life-endangering act with knowledge of the danger and conscious disregard for life.

The Court of Appeal had separately ruled that Chun’s admission that he fired a gun should have been excluded as induced by a false promise of leniency. That ruling was outside the scope of review, and the Court of Appeal had not decided whether the evidentiary error and the instructional error together were prejudicial. The Supreme Court therefore reversed the Court of Appeal’s judgment and remanded for that cumulative-prejudice determination.