California’s Implausible Crime of Assault

Details

Author(s):
Publish Date:
December 31, 2013
Publication Title:
8 California Legal History 391 .
Format:
Journal Article
Citation(s):
  • Miguel A. Méndez, California's Implausible Crime of Assault, 8 California Legal History 391 (2013).

Abstract

FROM THE CONCLUSION (page 443 — footnotes omitted):
By converting the crime of assault into a form of negligent endangerment, [People v. ] Williams[, 26 Cal. 4th 779 (2001)] unjustly extends criminal liability for assault to those who commit assaults negligently. The crime of assault, as a form of attempt, is designed to punish only those whose purpose is to inflict a criminal battery. Extending the punishment to those who do not entertain this blameworthy mental state is unjust because it punishes those the Legislature did not have in mind when it enacted the assault statutes and prescribed their punishments.
Williams' adverse consequences are not limited to the crime of assault. By defining assaults as crimes of negligence, Williiams threatens to undermine important limitations on the use of felony assaults as the predicate felony in second degree felony murder prosecutions. Without these restraints, prosecutors can circumvent the requirement of having to prove the mental state of murder by relying on the second degree felony murder doctrine. Since most homicides result from some kind of felonious assault, judges would find it much more difficult to use [People v.] Ireland[, 70 Cal. 2d 522 (1969)] and [People v.] Ford[, 60 Cal. 2d 772 (1964), overruled in part by People v. Satchell, 6 Cal. 3d 28 (1971)] to bar the use of these assaults when their mental state is supplied by section 240 [of the California Penal Code] as construed by the court.
In addition, Williams' flawed analysis of treatises, inappropriate appeals to intoxication doctrines, and failure to distinguish assault's actus reus from its mens rea all contravene established criminal law docrine. Willliams is bad law doctrinally and even worse law normatively. If the [California Supreme] Court continues to decline to overturn it, then the [California State] Legislature should do so by enacting the kind of legislation that has been described [in this article].