Meehan's reasoning finds its way into high court rulings, state law

When the 1994 Northridge earthquake smashed a cabinet of collectible china in her Beverly Hills home, Kathleen A. Meehan drove to work anyway, only to find her office parking garage had collapsed.

"My husband said, 'We've been talking about going back to Fresno. I say we go before the locusts. We've already had the fires, the flood and now an earthquake,'" she told the Daily Journal in 2023. They went.

Thirty-two years later, Meehan, on the 5th District Court of Appeal in Fresno since 2017, is asking voters Nov. 3 to retain her for a 12-year term.

Her opinions have influenced state Supreme Court decisions and legislation.

In Civil Rights Department v. Cathy's Creations Inc. (2025), she wrote for a unanimous panel reversing a trial court ruling that a Bakersfield bakery had not violated the Unruh Civil Rights Act. On religious grounds, the bakery owner refused to sell a cake for a same-sex wedding reception. The cake was a standard design offered for different occasions.

The bakery's policy was discriminatory on its face, Meehan wrote, and referring the couple to another bakery did not provide full and equal access. "A three-tiered, plain white cake with no writing, engravings, adornments, symbols or images is not pure speech," she wrote.

Meehan held that transgender people have a constitutionally protected privacy interest in concealing their identity change in In re M.T. (2024), and ordered sealed the entire name and gender change record of a woman harassed after being "outed" on social media. A trial judge had sealed only part of it, saying name changes should be public.

Meehan left to the Legislature whether all such records should be confidential. Lawmakers responded in 2025 with SB 59, which makes the records confidential regardless of age, states an intent to codify the ruling and writes her privacy holding, nearly word for word, into state law.

With appellate courts split, Meehan held that a defendant who agreed to a stipulated sentence could seek the benefit of a later law letting judges strike a five-year enhancement without obtaining a certificate of probable cause. Doing so could unravel the plea deal, she wrote in People v. Ellis (2019), but that choice "lies in each instance with the defendant."

"We are persuaded by Ellis," the state Supreme Court wrote six months later in People v. Stamps (2020), quoting her opinion at length.

Meehan dissented in People v. Williams (2024), arguing that a man identified by three eyewitnesses as the lone gunman in a shooting was not entitled to an evidentiary hearing on his attempted murder resentencing petition under SB 1437, the 2018 law narrowing accomplice liability.

When the undisputed record shows a petitioner acted alone, checking boxes on a form should not be enough to obtain a hearing, she wrote. Otherwise, "the prima facie review stage is rendered hollow."

The state Supreme Court cited her dissent in People v. Patton (2025), rejecting the Williams majority's approach to undisputed facts in the conviction record. The Williams majority opinion was later ordered depublished.

Meehan grew up in Fresno, where her father, Tom Meehan, was a beloved Fresno Bee sportswriter. Her husband of 45 years and her three siblings and their families live in the area. "So, my roots run deep," she wrote in an email.

After graduating from UC Davis School of Law in 1985, she spent nearly a decade in Los Angeles doing securities and business litigation. Back in Fresno, she became a shareholder at Baker, Manock & Jensen, representing trade groups for growers of almonds, cherries, raisins and tomatoes against First Amendment challenges to mandatory advertising assessments.

After three years as a deputy attorney general, she became a Fresno County Superior Court commissioner in 2011. Gov. Jerry Brown appointed her a judge in 2014 and named her to the Court of Appeal.

She helped found the county bar's pro bono section, served as president of the board of Central California Legal Services and was named Pro Bono Attorney of the Year in 2004.