California Court of Appeals, Second District, Second Division
CERTIFIED
FOR PARTIAL PUBLICATION[*]
APPEAL
from a judgment of the Los Angeles County Superior Court No.
KA115677, Steven D. Blades, Judge. Affirmed.
Rachel
Lederman, under appointment by the Court of Appeal for
Defendant and Appellant.
Xavier
Becerra, Attorney General, Lance E. Winters, Senior Assistant
Attorney General, Scott A. Taryle, Supervising Deputy
Attorney General, and Colleen M. Tiedemann, Deputy Attorney
General, for Plaintiff and Respondent.
HOFFSTADT J.
A
criminal defendant furnishes controlled substances to
another, who dies from ingesting those drugs. Is that
defendant immune from criminal liability for personally
inflicting great bodily injury upon the drug user by virtue
of the user's voluntary ingestion of the drugs? The
courts do not agree on how to answer this question:
People v. Martinez (2014) 226 Cal.App.4th 1169
(Martinez) says “no, ” while People
v. Slough (2017) 11 Cal.App.5th 419 (Slough)
says “yes.” We conclude that Martinez
has the better argument. Because we also reject the
sentencing challenges raised by the defendant in this case
(in the unpublished portion of our decision), we affirm.
FACTS
AND PROCEDURAL BACKGROUND
I.
Facts
In late
June 2017, Treyvon Love Ollo (defendant), then 18 years old,
invited his 16-year-old girlfriend Reina over to his house.
He told her that he “ha[d] some coke that [he] got last
night.” Reina came over, and the couple retreated to
defendant's bedroom and had sex.
Defendant
then provided Reina with a white, powdery substance that he
thought was cocaine, but which had a “[weird]
smell.” Reina cut the powder into lines using
defendant's driver's license, and snorted it up her
nose. She passed out within 30 minutes.
As it
turns out, the white powdery substance was not cocaine. It
was fentanyl. Like cocaine, fentanyl is a controlled
substance, but one that is 50 to 100 times more potent than
heroin.
Reina
died from a fentanyl overdose later that night.
When
defendant awoke the next morning, he found her dead. At
first, he tried to get a friend to help him put her corpse in
an Uber to transport it to a hospital. However, when no one
would agree to help, he called 911.
II.
Procedural Background
The
People charged defendant with the crime of furnishing,
giving, or offering to furnish or give a controlled substance
to a minor (Health & Saf. Code, § 11353). The People
further alleged that defendant personally inflicted great
bodily injury upon Reina (Pen. Code, § 12022.7, subd.
(a)).[1]
The
jury was instructed on two possible theories of criminal
liability-namely, that defendant (1) furnished or gave drugs
to Reina, ...