‘Justice is not on my side’: Courts’ interpretation of felony murder rule change leaves out people who pleaded to manslaughter

Proposed changes to SB 1437, which amended California's felony murder rule, are coming this year.

SACRAMENTO — In 2016, 42-year-old Vuong Dihn Phan had the odd misfortune of not being convicted of murder. If he had been, there’s a good chance he’d be out of prison right now.

Instead, Phan — accused of participating in an Oakland brothel robbery in which a cohort, Curtis Yee, ran upstairs by himself and fatally shot 31-year-old Jian Jin of San Jose — did what authorities wanted him to do: he accepted a plea deal, testified at Yee’s trial, and received a lighter sentence than the life term he was facing. But because of that decision, appeals courts ruled that Phan was ineligible for benefit from SB 1437, a 2019 law that says prosecutors can no longer file murder charges against lesser-involved accomplices to a felony that results in a killing and voids existing convictions of such accomplices.

Since SB 1437 took effect, California appeals courts have consistently ruled only those who were convicted of murder are eligible for relief under the law. That decision excludes the biggest pool of people charged under the old rule: those like Phan, who were convicted of lesser offenses in exchange for a reduced sentence through plea deals. In Phan’s case, he pleaded no contest to manslaughter as part of a plea deal.

“Justice is not on my side, that’s what I see,” Phan, an inmate at Avenal State Prison, said in a recent phone interview. “I didn’t know the law was going to change. I had to take the deal, because if I didn’t take the deal I’d have to take a life sentence.”

California lawmakers are now proposing a change to state law, SB 775, which would benefit people in Phan’s situation. The bill proposes to expand SB 1437’s application to manslaughter charges, and includes attempted murders as well.

SB 1437 changed a California penal code law that made accomplices liable for murder when someone is killed during the commission of other felony crimes, such as robbery, even if they didn’t directly have aid in the killing or intend for anyone to be killed. In the pre-SB 1437 world, prosecutors only needed to prove participation in the underlying felony to get a murder conviction.

The law has resulted in dozens, if not hundreds, of murder convictions being overturned across California. Other states — Illinois, Massachusetts, and Michigan among them — have enacted similar reforms.

“When you’re facing life, it’s such a risk to throw the dice and maybe spend rest of your life in prison versus when a prosecutor comes at you with a determinate (prison) term,” Jenny Brandt, a California-based appeal attorney, said in an interview. She later added, “The people who are being offered these deals, it’s not only that they’re less culpable but it’s also that there’s less evidence against them.”

In one example from the Bay Area, a woman named Althea Housely was denied an appeal of her manslaughter conviction, stemming from a 2010 Oakland robbery in which her boyfriend, George Huggins Jr., fatally shot Jinghong Kang while robbing Kang for $17.

Housley agreed to testify against Huggins, in exchange for a reduced sentence, which was facilitated through a manslaughter plea. She was sentenced to 15 years, and is scheduled for release in 2022. While acknowledging that it may seem unfair, the California First District Appeals Court found in a May 7 decision that it was “not absurd” that Housely and others may end up serving longer sentences for manslaughter than if they’d been convicted at trial.

“We leave it to the Legislature to decide whether further ameliorative changes should be made for offenders like Housley, who have pled no contest to voluntary manslaughter in order to avoid murder convictions under the felony murder rule or natural and probable consequences doctrine,” the appeals court decision said, citing several prior decisions that determined SB 1437 didn’t apply to manslaughter.

The courts’ ruling has to led situations where defendants convicted of the same conduct have wildly different prison sentences in ways that the law’s authors didn’t intend, said Kate Chatfield, an attorney and Senior Advisor for The Justice Collaborative who helped write SB 1437. Chatfield said she knew of one case where two people who participated in a burglary were charged with murder when their cohort killed a resident. One of them accepted a plea deal to manslaughter, while the other took his case to trial and lost.

“So now, one is stuck in prison under a manslaughter plea and the other was freed under SB 1437,” Chatfield said. “This is the kind of absurd result that we are seeing from the court’s interpretation.”

But the fact that the law may change is of little solace to men like Charles Byrd, who was 21 when he was charged with murder under the theory that he set up an acquaintance, Abram Pringle, to be carjacked, and that a co-defendant fatally shot Pringle. In a recent interview, Byrd said his attorney told him he appeared to qualify for SB 1437, but the courts rejected his petition because he was convicted of manslaughter, not murder, in a plea deal that sentenced him to serve 11 years in state prison. He is scheduled for release in December, before SB 775 — if it passes — would take effect.

“I felt I had to take the deal for my freedom, that’s how I looked at it,” Byrd said.