The Fourth District Court of Appeal, Division Three, ruled in People v. Harzan that the Orange County Superior Court erred when it told Jan Curtis Harzan he could pursue an entrapment defense only if prosecutors were permitted to introduce evidence from two women who said Harzan had molested them in the early 1970s, when he was a teenager. The women, identified in the opinion as Jane Doe #1 and Jane Doe #2, came forward to police after Harzan's 2020 arrest.
Writing for a unanimous panel, Justice Gooding said the trial court's ruling rested on a "legal misunderstanding of the entrapment defense." California, the court noted, abandoned the subjective test for entrapment decades ago in People v. Barraza.
"[E]ntrapment turns on whether the police conduct at issue would have caused a normally law-abiding person to commit the charged offenses; it does not depend on what the particular defendant was thinking when he committed the acts in question," the opinion states.
Harzan was arrested in July 2020 after a nine-day exchange with a Huntington Beach vice detective posing as a girl named "Brianna" who responded to a Craigslist post seeking a "young coed friend." The trial court had already found the prior-misconduct evidence "highly prejudicial" and "unfair" for the prosecution's case-in-chief, describing the alleged conduct as "very, very old and very, very different than the conduct we're looking at in this case."
The panel said that calculus did not change when an entrapment defense was in play. "That evidence would not have become any less prejudicial if Harzan had raised an entrapment defense," the court wrote.
Justice Gooding rejected the Attorney General's reliance on People v. Foster, a 1974 decision that allowed prior crimes to rebut entrapment. Foster applied the subjective standard "disapproved five years later in Barraza," the opinion said, and is "thus of no aid to the Attorney General here."
The court also rebuffed the argument that Harzan forfeited review by declining to raise the defense at trial. Because the facts surrounding the entrapment claim were "largely undisputed" and drawn from the documented messages between Harzan and "Brianna," the panel found a sufficient record to review the ruling.
Applying the harmless-beyond-a-reasonable-doubt standard from Chapman v. California, the panel said it could not conclude the error was harmless. The opinion noted that every time Harzan told "Brianna" he could not have sex with her because she was a minor, "she expressed disappointment and tried to convince him to change his mind by using sympathy and guilt," and assured him he "would not get caught." Those techniques, the court said, "were cited in Barraza as examples of possible police overreach."
The panel separately found the evidence legally sufficient to support the jury's verdict, clearing the way for retrial. "The facts that he repeatedly told her he wanted to have sex with her and then drove to the place he had arranged to meet her is sufficient to support his convictions," the court wrote.
Harzan had been sentenced to two years in prison. Justices Moore, acting presiding justice, and Sanchez concurred. Harzan was represented by David Dworakowski of Quinn & Dworakowski. Deputy Attorneys General Robin Urbanski, Donald W. Ostertag and Flavio Nominati appeared for the state, with Chief Assistant Attorney General Charles C. Ragland and Attorney General Rob Bonta on the briefs.