California v. Sanders

In 2014, Misha Sanders pleaded guilty to two counts of commercial burglary and two counts of identity theft. Sanders discovered a credit card on the ground; the card belonged to someone else. Sanders used the card to obtain cigarettes and a beverage at a convenience store. She also obtained cash at a Burger King restaurant. The total amount of charges made by Sanders on the credit card were $174.61. In 2017, Sanders filed a petition under Proposition 47 (Safe Neighborhoods and Schools Act, section 1170.18) to reclassify all of her convictions as misdemeanors and to dismiss the identity theft counts. The trial court granted the petition as to the burglary counts, reasoning they qualified as "shoplifting" under section 459.5. The court denied the petition with regard to the violations of section 530.5. Sanders contended that since the burglary charges have been reclassified as misdemeanor shoplifting and the amount of goods taken from the merchants was under $950, the section 530.5 violations should have been considered petty thefts, be reduced to misdemeanors and dismissed. She asserted that in light of the court's opinions in California v. Page, 3 Cal.5th 1175 (2017) and California v. Romanowski, 2 Cal.5th 903 (2017), the Court of Appeal should find the violations of section 530.5 to be theft offenses and thus subject to the determination they amount to petty theft within the meaning of section 490.2. The Court found the violations of section 530.5(a) were not theft offenses: they are not specified in section 1170.18, and are not subject to reclassification under that section. Nor did the Court believe the decisions in Page and Romanowski compelled adoption of Sanders's interpretation. Accordingly, the Court affirmed the trial court's decision. View "California v. Sanders" on Justia Law