CJLF to Participate in Oral Argument Before Cal Supreme Court

CJLF Legal Director Kent Scheidegger will be delivering oral argument remotely to the California Supreme Court Tomorrow morning (April 7) at 9:00 am.

The argument will be live streamed at this link:  https://www.courts.ca.gov/35333.htm

The name of the case is In re Friend (Jack Wayne) on Habeas Corpus, S256914.

This will be the first case argued tomorrow and you should be able to click on it to watch it occur.

The case of In re Friend involves a death-sentenced murderer’s request that the court effectively invalidate voter-enacted limits to repeated appeals. In 1989, an Alameda County jury found habitual felon John Friend guilty of the 1984 robbery and stabbing murder of bartender Herbert Pierucci. At trial, witnesses testified about Friend’s plan to rob the bartender, placed him at the murder scene with a knife, and of his later admission of killing Pierucci for roughly $300. Friend’s conviction and sentence were upheld by the California Supreme Court in July 2009. His habeas corpus challenge to his conviction and sentence were reviewed and denied in 2015. In 2016, state voters adopted Proposition 66, which prohibits state courts from reviewing successive habeas corpus petitions except in cases where there is significant evidence questioning the defendant’s guilt. In this case, the murderer has no credible claim of innocence. Instead, he argues that the initiative’s prohibition of successive petitions, does not include successive petitions where the defendant adequately explains why some new claims were not included in the first petition. CJLF, which authored most of Proposition 66, argues that “successive” means any petition after the first one, period.  California’s Attorney General and Biden’s new  head HHS, Xavier Becerra, filed argument supporting the murderer’s claim.