The Court affirmed the judgement in a death penalty, arson felony-murder case with five firefighter victims. Non-capital holdings:

(1) Defendant forfeited the claimed error in replacing the assigned judge by failing to object. The claim was meritless when judicial substitutions do not require defense consent.

(2) Defendant forfeited his challenge to the denial of a pretrial change of venue motion when he failed to renew the objection after voir dire. The claim fails on its merits where the relevant factors favored the motion’s denial.

(3) Substantial evidence supported the murder convictions, special circumstance findings, and arson convictions for other non-fatal fires where overwhelming evidence tied the defendant to certain fires and expert testimony on uniqueness of incendiary devices established one arsonist started all the fires.

(4) Defendant forfeited his EC 352 challenge to the admissibility of The Anarchist Cookbook, recovered from defendant’s house, where trial counsel objected solely on hearsay grounds.

(5) No error in information charging malice murder under PC 187 and failing to specifically allege felony-murder or cite PC 189.

(6) To the extent the felony-murder instructions given at a trial pre-dating SB 1437 no longer correctly stated the law, the error is subject to Chapman analysis. Here, the error was harmless where the defendant was the actual killer under any definition of causation. The Court expressly declined to opine on the correctness of several lower court opinions finding the respective defendants not the “actual killer.”

The full opinion is available on the court’s website here: https://www4.courts.ca.gov/opinions/documents/S173784.PDF