The California Supreme Court held Thursday that a defendant is entitled to a full resentencing hearing, at which courts are directed to apply any ameliorative changes in the law to reduce a petitioner’s punishment absent a finding that such a sentence would endanger public safety, where his judgment included a now-defunct prior-prison enhancement, even if the penalty associated with the allegation was stricken.

The California Supreme Court held Thursday that a group of plaintiffs was not precluded from filing a complaint in California against a school district and a former counselor over purported instances of sexual abuse based on having earlier filed and then voluntarily dismissed nearly identical actions in state and federal courts.

A routine progress hearing in Yolo County Superior Court took an unexpected turn Thursday when Judge Catherine Hohenwarter questioned what appeared to be artificial intelligence-generated language in a progress report submitted on behalf of an accused, raising concerns about the use of AI in documents filed with the court.

Div. Five of the First District Court of Appeal has held that a defendant who filed a motion alleging racial bias after he was convicted of attempted robbery with a firearm based on statistics from the Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation, purportedly showing that Black defendants faced gun allegations in Alameda County more often than White suspects, may be entitled to discovery of eight years of data from the local prosecutorial office.