Gooding: Seriousness of old crime can't block rehabilitation certificate

A man who served 27 years for murder, then spent his parole steering teenagers away from crime, was entitled to a certificate of rehabilitation, Justice Martha K. Gooding ruled in 2024. The law looks at his life after prison, she wrote, not the crime that sent him there.

Gooding, who joined the 4th District Court of Appeal's Division 3 in Santa Ana in 2023 after three decades as a litigator and nearly 10 years as an Orange County Superior Court judge, seeks a 12-year retention term Nov. 3.

George Dennis Rounds Jr. pleaded guilty in 1983 to second-degree murder and attempted murder after shooting members of a family. Paroled in 2010, he earned an associate degree, counseled students about avoiding crime, and started a business.

A San Bernardino County judge denied his petition, citing "the egregious nature of the offenses," fairness to the victims' family and what he saw as conflicting accounts of the shooting. People v. Rounds (2024).

Gooding rejected those reasons. The Legislature had not excluded murder convictions from eligibility. "If a court could harken back to the seriousness of the long-ago offense to deny relief, no one who has committed a serious or violent crime could ever receive a certificate of rehabilitation," she wrote.

Rounds's accounts were consistent, the Gooding wrote, and he had turned himself in the day after the shooting, "hardly the conduct of a young man who refused to accept responsibility."

One criminal ruling did not survive review. In People v. Hyatt (2025), Gooding wrote for a divided panel that a defendant sentenced to state prison could demand a speedy trial on other charges while awaiting transfer from county jail. Penal Code Section 1381 requires trial within 90 days of a valid demand.

Hyatt's lawyer served the demand when Hyatt was sentenced in an unrelated case. Prosecutors called it premature, and a judge later dismissed his felony assault case.

Waiting until prison transfer "could delay or deny, for reasons completely outside the defendant's control," a chance to resolve pending cases and seek concurrent sentences, Gooding wrote. Justice Joanne Motoike dissented, calling the ruling "an unwarranted departure from decades-old, settled case law."

The state Supreme Court unanimously reversed Aug. 6, holding the demand premature until Hyatt reached prison. It agreed prosecutors could appeal the dismissal and criticized a deputy district attorney for responding directly to Hyatt rather than his lawyer, quoting Gooding's footnote.

Gooding's civil opinions include Applied Medical Distribution Corp. v. Jarrells (2024), involving a sales executive who copied company files into a laptop folder before joining a competitor. No California court had decided whether a trade secret owner's "actual loss" includes the cost of investigating a theft, she noted.

Companies can recover as damages what they spend tracking and retrieving stolen trade secrets, Gooding held, but not the cost of investigating whether a theft occurred. The panel also held that misappropriation does not require proof of damages, allowing injunctions before harm occurs.

She graduated first in her 1981 UC Berkeley law class and was elected to the Order of the Coif. At Howard Rice, Howrey and Jones Day, she handled complex commercial and securities litigation and regulatory and government enforcement matters before Gov. Jerry Brown appointed her to the Superior Court in 2013.

Her first assignment there was criminal cases. Her supervising judge marveled at how quickly she mastered criminal law, then-Presiding Justice Kathleen O'Leary said at Gooding's September 2023 confirmation hearing. "She asked really good questions, and she never asked the same question twice," O'Leary said.

O'Leary also praised Gooding as generous with her time rather than "siloed" in her own cases, saying, "That's what we need at the Court of Appeal."

Asked at the hearing what she most looked forward to, Gooding cited "the luxury of time" to "think more deeply, to reflect more carefully," and the chance to keep learning. "Every single day, I am reminded how much I do not know," she said.