Supreme Court sided with Justice Raphael in 3 cases

When an appellate majority ruled in 2023 that a San Bernardino County judge lacked authority to apply a new gang law at a resentencing, Justice Michael J. Raphael dissented. The state Supreme Court unanimously agreed with him.

Raphael, appointed to the 4th District Court of Appeal, Division 2 in Riverside by Gov. Jerry Brown in 2018 and retained by voters in 2022, seeks a full 12-year term on the Nov. 3 ballot.

The dispute in People v. Lopez (2023) arose from a 2014 shooting that left one man dead. Oscar Lopez was originally sentenced to 141 years to life, and Division 2 sent the case back in 2020 for resentencing. Meanwhile, AB 333 took effect, raising the bar for proving gang enhancements. The trial judge refused to apply it, ruling the conviction was final.

The appellate majority agreed the case wasn't final but held the remand let the judge revisit only the sentence. Raphael called the question easy. A criminal case has one moment of finality, when the prosecution as a whole ends, he wrote. "This case has never been reopened because it was never closed." His colleagues, he added, were "shadowboxing with cases in the wrong arena," relying on decisions about final judgments reopened in later proceedings.

The state Supreme Court agreed in January 2025, holding that a remittitur's limits do not determine whether an ameliorative law applies.

Raphael's 2021 concurrence in Leon v. County of Riverside anticipated another Supreme Court reversal. Sheriff's deputies left José Leon's body exposed for about eight hours after a neighbor shot him at a Cherry Valley mobile home park.

Relying on decades of appellate decisions extending Government Code Section 821.6 immunity to police investigations, Division 2 ruled for the county. Raphael joined "with some reluctance," describing an "astonishing situation": the Supreme Court had read the statute to cover only malicious prosecution, while the Court of Appeal read it far more broadly. He wrote that "36 years of precedent is persuasive when you sit on the court that issued it," but that any correction "will have to come from our Supreme Court, rather than from us."

The high court unanimously reversed in 2023, disapproving 12 appellate decisions that had read the immunity more broadly.

His opinion in People v. Braden (2021) drew a line on the state's mental health diversion law. Cory Juan Braden Jr., convicted of resisting an executive officer after punching a sheriff's deputy, sought diversion only after the jury's verdict. Raphael held that was too late, disagreeing with another appellate court that allowed requests up to sentencing.

Reading "until adjudication" to mean sentencing would mean "the very term being defined would be read out of the statute," he wrote. He gave little weight to dicta in an earlier Supreme Court decision that pointed both ways; drawing conclusions from it, he wrote, "would be tasseography," that is, reading tea leaves.

The Supreme Court affirmed 5-2 in 2023, twice quoting his opinion.

Before his appointment, Raphael served six years on the Los Angeles County Superior Court. He previously spent 13 years as an assistant U.S. attorney in Los Angeles, the last five as chief of the criminal appeals section. He graduated from Yale Law School.

He teaches opinion writing at the Judicial Council's orientation for new appellate justices and writes Daily Journal columns. In March, he traced a statistic the state Supreme Court has cited since 2015, that roughly one in 200 armed robberies ends in death, to a footnote built on 1980 data. While agreeing with the rule it supports, he wrote that "a plenitude of citations is not data, either."

In July, he questioned "patchwork resentencing," laws that reopen sentences for some prisoners while others with the same enhancements get no hearing, building on a 2021 column about the Estrada rule at the heart of Lopez. Which prisoners receive sentencing hearings, he wrote, is up to the Legislature, not judges.