The case arises from the December 1985 kidnapping, rape, and murder of Linda Canady in Sacramento County. John Anthony Bertsch and Jeffery Lee Hronis, who were being pursued by law enforcement for a string of armed convenience store robberies, told friends they planned to stake out a shopping center parking lot, overpower someone, and take their car. On December 22, 1985, they abducted Canady from a shopping center, drove hundreds of miles south, raped and sodomized her, killed her by inflicting a massive crush-type injury to her back and chest, and discarded her body in an Imperial County irrigation canal. DNA testing, credit card records, handwriting evidence, and incriminating statements to friends connected both men to the crime. Separate juries convicted them of murder, rape, and kidnapping with multiple special-circumstance findings, and separate penalty juries returned death verdicts for each.
The reversal of Hronis's death sentence turns on a retroactivity question. After the jury found Hronis guilty, he sought to represent himself at the penalty phase, stating he did not want to contest penalty and preferred death to prison. The trial court granted the Faretta motion and allowed Hronis to proceed pro se. He offered no evidence, did not testify, and gave no closing argument. At the time, California courts applied the same competency standard to self-representation requests as to competency to stand trial. In 2008, the United States Supreme Court decided Indiana v. Edwards, which held that states may require a higher showing of mental competence before permitting a defendant to represent himself at trial, even if that defendant is competent to stand trial under the Dusky standard. The California Supreme Court adopted that higher standard in People v. Johnson in 2012.
Chief Justice Guerrero, writing for a unanimous court, held that Johnson announced a new rule and that the rule applies retroactively to cases not yet final on appeal. The court held no exception to the general presumption of retroactivity applied: Edwards was decided 17 years ago, Johnson has been settled law for over a decade, and applying the standard to nonfinal cases would not unduly disrupt the administration of justice or unfairly undermine reliance on prior law.
Applying Johnson retroactively, the court held the error was prejudicial. The trial court applied the Dusky competency-to-stand-trial standard rather than the higher Edwards/Johnson standard when it granted Hronis's Faretta motion, and the record raised a reasonable possibility that Hronis's mental condition — including cognitive deficits, his belief that God would deliver him from conviction, and the extensive competency litigation that preceded the penalty phase — placed him in the gray area between the Dusky standard and the higher standard for self-representation. The court noted that none of the psychological reports addressed whether Hronis had a severe mental illness bearing on his competency to present his own defense without the help of counsel, since they utilized the pre-Edwards framework. The court also observed that the trial court had ordered an additional expert evaluation before denying the renewed competency motion, reflecting at least some openness to the possibility that Hronis was substantially impaired, and that had the Edwards standard already been in effect, the court could have expressly considered whether Hronis was sufficiently impaired to preclude self-representation. Finally, the court noted that Hronis's complete failure to present any mitigation meant the jury never heard evidence that might have produced a different penalty verdict. The court concluded it was reasonably possible the error affected the penalty verdict and reversed the death judgment as to Hronis, remanding for further proceedings.
Bertsch's death sentence was affirmed. The court rejected his numerous guilt-phase and penalty-phase claims, including challenges to the dual-jury procedure, the admission of DNA evidence under Crawford, Sanchez, and the Kelly rule, various instructional errors, and the constitutionality of California's capital sentencing scheme. The court also vacated the unpaid balances of the $10,000 restitution fines imposed on both defendants, which became unenforceable by operation of Penal Code section 1465.9, subdivision (d) after ten years.