No wonder it took until the last filing day within the 90-day period to decide the capital appeal in People v. Daniels.  There are five different opinions in the case today, leading to a reversal of only the death sentence, due to an invalid waiver of the defendant’s right to a jury trial.  Everything else is affirmed.  But the court came close to not having a majority agreeing to any disposition at all.  A brief per curiam opinion serves as a scorecard for the appeal, recounting where the seven justices stand in the four separate opinions that follow.

The defendant was convicted in a court trial, without a lawyer, of a laundry list of major crimes.  There were also two special circumstance findings, which were the basis for the death penalty.

Justice Mariano-Florentino Cuéllar writes what is designated as the lead opinion, which Justices Kathryn Werdegar and Goodwin Liu sign.  These three justices believe everything should be reversed — the convictions, the special circumstance findings, and the death penalty — because, they conclude, the defendant’s jury trial waivers were not “knowing and intelligent.”  “[T]he court accepted Daniels’s waiver without ever inquiring as to Daniels’s understanding of any substantive aspect of what a jury is,” the lead opinion says.  Thus, although Daniels clearly waived his right to a jury trial, the three justices say they “decline to conflate a knowing, intelligent waiver with an emphatic one.”  Also, however, the opinion rejects several additional defense arguments — stemming from his waiver of the right to counsel — and all the other justices agree on these points.