California Legal Brief

The Rule of J.O. v. Superior Court is that if a party timely objects to a Code of Civil Procedure section 170.6 motion and makes a prima facie showing that the motion's proponent is lodging bad faith blanket challenges against a judge, a court may look beyond the section 170.6 affidavit or oral statement and inquire into the legitimacy of the party's assertions of prejudice, under circumstances where bad faith blanket abuses of section 170.6 materially impair the judiciary's constitutional function to effectively administer justice.

The Rule of People v. Emrick is that probation conditions cannot delegate excessive judicial authority to probation departments to determine the nature of sanctions and cannot deny custody credits for time in residential treatment without a knowing and voluntary waiver, under circumstances where conditions give probation officers open-ended discretion to jail probationers based on unilateral determinations of treatment non-completion.

The Rule of Armstrong v. Superior Court is that Penal Code section 1000.7 grants probation departments, not trial courts, the authority to determine whether defendants meet statutory criteria for young adult deferred entry of judgment programs, under circumstances where the Legislature has explicitly assigned this determination to the probation department through clear statutory language.