4DCA Division 2 Oral Argument 2026/04/07 Morning Session - Apr 07, 2026

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4DCA Division 2 Oral Argument 2026/04/07 Morning Session

California Fourth District Court of Appeal, Division Two 3h 2m 8 chapters transcribed 1 month ago official recording ↗

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Transcript generated automatically by AI and may contain errors.

What does the court’s opening and roll‑call look like?

Unknown 15:08

Right.

Unknown 15:14

Good morning and welcome and please be seated. Welcome to uh District Four, Division Two. My name's Justice Miller. This is Justice Codrington and Justice Menetrez. Good morning. We will be a single panel on the first. It's uh number ten. The people versus uh the superior court, Russell Austin, and if we could have counsel come forward please. And if you could state your name for the record and spell your last name, please.

Matthew Murray 15:48

Sure, Matthew Murray, M U R R A Y for the people. Welcome. Council?

Manuel Ramirez 15:54

Your Honor, um good morning. Brian Cosgrove with the Public Defender's Office. I'm one of the counsel for Mr. Austin.

Unknown 16:00

Can you repeat your name, please? Yeah, if we get your name and spell your last name for the clerk, please. Sure.

Manuel Ramirez 16:05

First name is Brian, E R I A N. Last name is Costgrove, which is C O S G R O V

Unknown 16:11

E. Welcome, and you may be seated. This is a uh petition that was granted. You uh can open and close or reserve time, whichever you would like.

Matthew Murray 16:21

Uh I'll reserve five minutes, Your Honor, but I I doubt I'll use my entire time today. Okay. You may proceed. Thank you very much. Uh good morning, may please the court. Um obviously the people agree with the court's tentative result in this case, but I'm concerned that the Superior Court is essentially going to overreact to this opinion and apply it more broadly than the court maybe intended. Um my concern was exacerbated earlier this year on February sixth during a status hearing on this case and Mosby, uh when Judge Judge Schuka said, quote, we as a court are still going to analyze this and see, you know, how does this affect the other cases? How does it affect other judges? You know, there are judges besides myself that were actually in management positions in Saka, which is our sex crimes unit at the DA's office, in gangs and homicide, you know.

Matthew Murray 17:11

Does that affect other RJAs in those cases? Also, I was sort of perplexed to understand maybe in This case, people's positions are different than I guess similar situated cases in front of Judge Hollenhorst, end quote. And as a matter of fact, those two cases in front of Judge Hollenhorst were both also subject to 170.1s, went to different counties on very similar facts and came back with different results. So I expect that this court's going to be seeing some filings on those. All of that is to say um this is likely going to be the first published case on uh on this specific topic and obviously it's going to affect probably every county in the state because there's a lot of prosecutors who are uh former prosecutors who are now judges.

Matthew Murray 17:50

So um my reading of the tentative is that the court was um engaged in uh in a sort of intensive fact-based analysis of this issue and I think it would uh behoove the court to add some more important facts or what I view as important facts uh to this uh opinion that you intend to publish. So for that reason I have three suggestions on um maybe additions or or things that the tenant could flesh out. uh the most important of which is um We pointed this out in the ASD and also we reemphasized it in the traverse, but um the sort of downhill effects of the of Mr. Austin's expert opinions and how they might reflect negatively on Judge Shuka's work as a prosecutor. I think that's an important component of this, um, because as a as the reasonable person from the outside looking in, which is the standard here, um, I think that that that's something that would really affect an objective observer.

Matthew Murray 18:46

being that Judge Shuka is going to have to evaluate this expert's methodology while in the background, consciously or unc unconsciously, she might be thinking, Well, how would this apply to the cases that I prosecuted? And as we demonstrated, again We disagree. The people disagree with how Uh Mr. Austin's expert has experts have conducted their analysis. We don't think it's right at all. But that's gonna have to be judged by uh the bench officer who eventually hears this. And so I think um looking at that plus her work at the DA's office, in addition to the fact that some of the cases that she worked on were in the time period that we're talking about and the data set that we're talking about, I think that's