People v. McInnis (2025) · DecisionDepot

People v. McInnis

Name: California Superior Court Tentative Rulings
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California Court of Appeal Nov 13, 2025 No. D082909Published

Filed 11/13/25

CERTIFIED FOR PUBLICATION

COURT OF APPEAL, FOURTH APPELLATE DISTRICT

DIVISION ONE

STATE OF CALIFORNIA

THE PEOPLE, D082909

Plaintiff and Appellant,

v. (Super. Ct. No. SCD289932)

LEON DANIEL MCINNIS,

Defendant and Respondent.

APPEAL from an order of the Superior Court of San Diego County, Jeffrey F. Fraser, Judge. Reversed and remanded with instructions. Summer Stephan, District Attorney, Linh Lam, Chief Deputy District Attorney, Valerie Ryan, Assistant Chief Deputy District Attorney, Kimberly Roth and Adriana Ross, Deputy District Attorneys, for Plaintiff and Appellant. Mark Alan Hart, under appointment by the Court of Appeal, for Defendant and Respondent. INTRODUCTION In 1994, Karl Senser was fatally stabbed five times in the chest. Law enforcement amassed very strong circumstantial evidence that Leon Daniel

McInnis and his friend, Steven Thomas, together, murdered Senser during a carjacking, kidnapping, and robbery. Although the People successfully prosecuted Thomas in 1996, they did not believe they had enough evidence, then, to successfully convict McInnis of murder. In 2018, the People decided to take a fresh look at the case in search of Thomas’s accomplice. They conducted DNA testing for the first time on items that had been collected during the original investigation, and they found McInnis’s DNA on a napkin that had been wrapped around a knife left at the crime scene and on the front passenger seat cover inside Senser’s car. They conducted further testing, in part to exclude other suspects, including a man Thomas originally told police had stabbed Senser. Based on this new evidence, the People charged McInnis with Senser’s murder in 2021, 27 years after he was killed. In 2023, McInnis filed a motion to dismiss the murder case on state due process grounds. He asserted the People were negligent in delaying prosecution for so long. He claimed his ability to defend against the charge was prejudicially impaired by the 27-year delay in filing the complaint, because one witness to the carjacking that preceded the murder had died and another witness to the carjacking had no recollection of the events. The People responded they refrained from filing a murder charge against McInnis in 1994, because they did not believe they had sufficient evidence to persuade a jury beyond a reasonable doubt to convict him. They charged him, in 2021, once they obtained DNA evidence placing McInnis at the crime scene and inside Senser’s car and were completely satisfied they had the evidence they needed to obtain a murder conviction. The delay, they argued, was justified “investigatory delay,” entitled to strong weight in the balancing of justification against prejudice to McInnis.

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judicial,” and “[p]ersons charged with the exercise of one power may not exercise either of the others except as permitted by this Constitution.” Based on these principles, the judicial branch is required to give deference to the People’s decisions concerning their ethical responsibilities when deciding whether to file charges. (Nelson, supra, 43 Cal.4th at p. 1256.) It cannot be seriously debated that law enforcement agencies “lack[ ] the means to exhaustively investigate every case that comes to [their] attention.” (Booth, supra, 3 Cal.App.5th at p. 1308.) And “[s]ometimes a crime simply is not solved immediately but must await some break in the case.” (People v. Cordova (2015) 62 Cal.4th 104, 120.) “These realities explain why the executive branch [also] has broad discretion when it comes to deciding how to allocate scarce investigative resources” and why the judicial branch must give deference to investigative decisions as well. (Booth, at p. 1309; see id. at pp. 1308–1310.) “The decision when to proceed with a prosecution is exclusively one for the executive branch of government. It can be a complex question and prosecutors have great discretion in deciding when and if to proceed. Simple wisdom and a due regard for the separation of powers doctrine allow for no other rule.” (People v. Boysen (2007) 165 Cal.App.4th 761, 774 (Boysen).) In accordance with these principles, our state due process clause “does not permit courts to abort criminal prosecutions simply because they disagree with a prosecutor’s judgment as to when to seek an indictment.” (Dunn- Gonzalez, supra, 47 Cal.App.4th. at p. 914.) When assessing the People’s justification for precharging delay, our high court in Nelson was explicit: courts may not find negligence by “second-guessing” (1) “the prosecution’s decision regarding whether sufficient evidence exists to warrant bringing charges,” (2) “how law enforcement agencies could have investigated a given

case,” nor (3) “how the state allocates its resources” during a criminal investigation. (Nelson, supra, 43 Cal.4th at p. 1256, italics added.) Thus, when bringing a motion for precharging delay, “[i]t is not enough for a defendant to argue that if the prosecutorial agencies had made his or her case a higher priority or had done things a bit differently[,] they would have solved the case sooner.” (Id. at p. 1257.) This deference owed by the judicial branch to the People’s investigative and charging decisions does not immunize those decisions from all scrutiny in the context of a motion to dismiss for precharging delay. The People’s assertions about their view of the evidence are not unimpeachable. Nor are they binding on trial courts when they find no evidentiary support in the record. In Pellegrino, supra, 86 Cal.App.3d at pages 780–781, for example, the trial court gave no credit to the People’s claim they refrained from bringing charges when their investigation was complete because they needed to keep the identity of an undercover agent confidential while they continued investigating the defendant for related charges. The appellate court concluded “the reason for the delay was not investigative needs but the lack of interest of the responsible agencies in prosecuting the defendants on the basis of [the] evidence,” and that the People changed their mind only when the defendants were arrested “ ‘fortuitous[ly]’ ” on other charges. (Id. at p. 781; see also Boysen, supra, 165 Cal.App.4th at p. 781 [finding “[t]he district attorney’s claims of justification for th[e] delay are unconvincing”].) Cowan exemplifies the application of these mandatory principles of judicial restraint. The victims in Cowan were an elderly couple found murdered in their home in September 1984. The husband had been shot and the wife strangled. Their home had been ransacked, with numerous items stolen. (Cowan, supra, 50 Cal.4th at pp. 416–417.) Months later, a

“would have been unable to parse” the four-person mixture until the technology became available in the early 2000s and that it was not until STRmix—which it called “a game-changer”—became available “around 2015” that this “type of complicated mixture analysis [became] much more practical.” Nonetheless, the trial court rejected the People’s explanation that the delay in testing the evidence from the car seat cover was justified by “resource constraints.” But the court did so because, in its view, the DNA result from the car seat cover had “minimal probative value.” Comparing it to the napkin result with a “powerful likelihood ratio of 9.47 x 1018,” the court opined the presence of McInnis’s DNA on the seat cover with a “low likelihood ratio” of 7.83 did “not place [him] in . . . Senser’s car with any reasonable level of certainty and [did] not markedly alter the balance of the evidence.” “Put simply,” by the court, “this weak DNA finding offers minimal, if any, justification for the nearly 27-year delay in charging” McInnis. The trial court also believed the People were required to provide a “legally acceptable justification” for reopening the case, because it believed there was already in 1994 “strong circumstantial evidence [that] showed [McInnis] participated in Senser’s murder” and then in 1996, “Thomas claimed [McInnis] was the actual killer.” It found “law enforcement did nothing on the case for a remarkable 22 years,” while “evidence of [McInnis’s] involvement did not change during that entire period.” The trial court further believed this case was not a “true cold case in which law enforcement exhausts every avenue of investigation at the time of the crime before a technological breakthrough decades later leads to key new evidence.” In its view, “[t]he case became ‘cold’ only by virtue of th[e] investigatory failure.” It determined there was no “ ‘new’ evidence but,

In 2007, the defendant applied for social security benefits and was told “he needed to clear a California warrant for his arrest.” (Mirenda, supra, 174 Cal.App.4th at pp. 1318–1319.) When prosecutors learned he was attempting to clear the warrant, they successfully located the victim and resumed the prosecution. The defendant was arrested in Arizona and arraigned in late 2007. (Id. at p. 1319.) He promptly filed a motion to dismiss for preaccusation delay. (Id. at p. 1320.) Mirenda thus involved a case “where 26 years passed between the time the criminal charges were filed and the time when the prosecution actually started.” (Id. at p. 1317, italics added.) In assessing the prosecution’s justification for the delay, the Mirenda court acknowledged and gave deference to prosecutors’ prerogative to refrain from filing charges until they are satisfied they can obtain a conviction. (Mirenda, supra, 174 Cal.App.4th at p. 1329.) But the court observed that prosecutors there had filed a complaint, which necessarily showed they had a good faith belief they could obtain a conviction. The court explained: “Although the victim . . . could not be located in 1982, the case was then ripe for prosecution because the investigation was complete. All the evidence of the crime had been collected, the identity of the shooter was known, statements of the victim and eyewitness were taken and included in various police reports of the incident, and the treating physician was alive. Although we appreciate that prosecutors are under no obligation to proceed with a case before they are satisfied that guilt can be proved beyond a reasonable doubt or before all the resources are reasonably available, here charges were in fact filed and a warrant issued in 1981.” (Id. at p. 1333, italics added.) The Mirenda court found the district attorney’s lengthy inaction after charges were filed to have been completely unjustified. (Mirenda, supra, 174 Cal.App.4th at pp. 1332–1333.) The court further found the unjustified delay

investigation, and when charges could and should have been filed. (Nelson, supra, 43 Cal.4th at p. 1256; Cowan, supra, 50 Cal.4th at p. 434; Bracamontes, supra, 12 Cal.5th at p. 989.) The Nelson rules do not preclude courts from questioning the veracity of the People’s claims and considering whether their stated reasons for a charging delay are pretextual or unsupported by the evidence. (E.g., Pellegrino, supra, 86 Cal.App.3d at pp. 780–781 [credibility]; Boysen, supra, 165 Cal.App.4th at p. 780 [credibility and evidentiary support].) Fourth, the dissent has misperceived investigative delay to mean delay attributable to an active, ongoing investigation, or one that is inactive due to a lack of resources or hitting “a dead end,” and not some other reason. (Dis. opn., post, at p. 16.) This, too, is an inaccurate understanding of Nelson. As we have already explained, investigative delay is delay due to the inability of the prosecution to ethically file charges. (Nelson, supra, 43 Cal.4th at p. 1256.) Because of this misunderstanding, the dissent places heavy focus on the original prosecutor’s “personal motivations” (dis. opn., post, at pp. 13– 14) for reopening the investigation (his impending retirement) and questions “whether the delay was truly related to the allocation of scarce resources . . . as opposed to [the] prosecutor simply choosing not to pursue the case” (id. at p. 11). The dissent would affirm on the ground that “there was ample support for the trial court’s finding that the combination of the lengthy period of inaction and the prosecutor’s personal motivation to get a conviction before he retired was problematic.” (Id. at p. 20, italics added.) This reasoning not only relies on the dissent’s new test, it misses the mark. The prosecutor’s subjective motivation for reopening a criminal investigation is not relevant. The relevant question is whether the delay is justified, not the decision to renew the investigation or the ultimate charging

decision. In any event, we see nothing wrong with reopening a case to take a fresh look at the investigation. (See Cowan, supra, 50 Cal.4th at p. 420; Booth, supra, 3 Cal.App.5th at p. 1309.) We find no impropriety on the part of the original prosecutor in wanting to bring to justice the accomplice to Senser’s murder before he retired. As our sister court in Booth observed, “it is wholly admirable that [the prosecutor] kept after this case” and those efforts should be “applaud[ed].” (Booth, at p. 1309.) Moreover, a prosecutor’s decision in this regard is an allocation of resources—an allocation of the prosecutor’s time—and is not subject to second-guessing by the judicial branch. (See Nelson, supra, 43 Cal.4th at p. 1257 [“It is not enough for a defendant to argue that if the prosecutorial agencies had made his or her case a higher priority or had done things a bit differently they would have solved the case sooner.”].) Fifth, somewhat inconsistent with its suggestion that Nelson should be applied to allow courts to find a due process violation where the delay is simply “problematic” (dis. opn., post, at p. 7), the dissent asserts all three of our high court’s controlling decisions—Nelson, Cowan, and Bracamontes—are inapposite here because, in its view, this case “does not fit neatly within the confines of the prior cases” (dis. opn., post, at p. 3; see also id. at pp. 23–25). We are not persuaded. As we have already discussed, the dissent’s attempt to distinguish Cowan and Bracamontes is unavailing because its reading of the facts in these cases is not correct. (See fns. 18 and 20, ante.) Additionally, repeatedly highlighting that the DNA evidence in Nelson was “so decisive” (dis. opn., post, at pp. 12, 1, 8), the dissent seems to imply Nelson’s rules are confined to cases involving cold hits, “decisive” DNA evidence, or new advances in technology. To the extent this is the dissent’s position, we disagree. Although it is true our high court granted review to

address certain “issues arising from prosecutions following . . . DNA ‘cold hits’ many years after the crime” (Nelson, supra, 43 Cal.4th at p. 1247), the court did not say in Nelson that the reach of its rules is limited to such cases. Nor did it say so in Cowan, when it applied Nelson to the reexamination of latent fingerprint evidence, or in Bracamontes, when it applied Nelson to the use of alternate light source technology. Neither of these cases involved new technology nor, in the case of Cowan, even DNA evidence. (See e.g., Cowan, supra, 50 Cal.4th at p. 415 [reexamination of latent fingerprint evidence 10 years after the crime]; Bracamontes, supra, 12 Cal.5th at p. 987.) Further still, our sister court in Booth, supra, 3 Cal.App.5th at page 1293, applied Nelson’s holding where the investigative breakthrough was an incriminating statement obtained 17 years after the murder from a witness authorities tried but failed to interview during the original investigation. Contrary to the dissent’s suggestion that the decisive nature of the DNA evidence drove the Nelson court’s due process analysis, the high court’s comment on the decisive statistical rarity of the DNA evidence in Nelson should be properly read in context of the other two issues on which the court granted review: whether “the methodology for assessing the statistical significance of a ‘cold hit’ from a DNA database require proof of general scientific acceptance” and how “the statistical significance of a ‘cold hit’ from a DNA database [should] be calculated.” (Nelson, at p. 1249.) Finally, contrary to the dissent’s claim that we have created a “new, narrower due process standard” here (dis. opn., post, at p. 1), we have faithfully followed Nelson. Nelson explains that delay is investigative until the point when “the prosecution believe[s] it ha[s] sufficient evidence to charge [the] defendant.” (Nelson, supra, 43 Cal.4th at p. 1256.) And Nelson holds that “[a] court should not second-guess the prosecution’s decision

concludes instead the court meant to fit its ruling into another category of unjustified delay: “ ‘reckless disregard of circumstances known to the prosecution suggesting that delay might prejudice the defense.’ ” (Dis. opn., post, at pp. 5, 7, italics omitted.) None of these words can be found in the trial court’s written ruling. Yet the dissent cites the “reckless disregard” language that Nelson quoted from United States Supreme Court cases (Nelson, supra, 43 Cal.4th at p. 1253), and asserts the prosecution’s decision to reopen and charge McInnis with murder 27 years later was “both arbitrary and done in reckless disregard of known circumstances suggesting [the delay will] prejudice [the defense].” (Dis. opn., post, at p. 20.) No such finding can be found in the trial court’s written ruling. The dissent, moreover, identifies no unique or “reckless” circumstance present here that would not be present in any other case. Whenever a prosecutor initially decides there is insufficient evidence for a prosecution to go forward, there is always a risk that evidence will be lost, witnesses will become unavailable, or memories will fade. This may ultimately harm the defense, the prosecution, or both. But that does not transform the prosecutor’s ethically required decision not to prosecute into reckless disregard of some future, unknown prejudice to the defendant. Second, the dissent contends we must defer to the trial court’s findings that the totality of the “new DNA evidence” was purportedly “ ‘weak,’ ” a finding it also claims the People do not challenge on appeal. (Dis. opn., post, at pp. 13, 18.) We disagree. The trial court specifically did not question the probative value of McInnis’s DNA on the napkin. Just the opposite. At the evidentiary hearing, the court said, “the napkin is the smoking gun.” (Italics added.) And, in its written ruling, the court found the napkin “was a crucial piece of evidence that law enforcement would have tested in the mid-1990’s

had they acted with reasonable diligence.” (Italics added.) The dissent ignores this factual finding by the trial court when it concludes the new DNA evidence in this case “simply add[ed] underwhelming circumstantial evidence to an already existing pile.” (Dis. opn., post, at p. 1.) But, as we have explained, the trial court erred when it assessed the People’s justification for the delay because it improperly removed the DNA evidence on the napkin from consideration of whether there was a change to the state of the evidence. The court improperly removed this “crucial piece of evidence” (the trial court’s words) from the equation on the ground that the People could have tested the napkin during the original investigation in 1994. After disregarding the importance of McInnis’s DNA on the napkin, the court erroneously considered whether McInnis’s DNA on Senser’s car seat cover, standing alone, changed the state of the evidence in a way that could have affected the prosecution’s charging decision. The court did not, as the dissent seems to be saying, conclude the sum of the DNA evidence on the napkin and the car seat cover was “weak.” And far from conceding the evidence was “weak,” the People argue in their opening brief on appeal that evidence of McInnis’s DNA on the car seat cover was the “ ‘crux’ ” of their case because it directly placed McInnis inside Senser’s car and “eliminat[ed] a possible innocent explanation for why [McInnis’s] DNA was on the napkin at the scene of the carjacking.” In support of this argument, DAI Johnson testified under oath based on his own personal knowledge about the value to the prosecution’s case of the additional testing that took place after the DNA results from the napkin. The trial court disagreed with the People’s assessment of the value of the car seat cover evidence; it did not make an adverse credibility finding. We cannot defer to the court’s improper second-guessing of the People’s judgment

evidence that the delay was at least partially attributable to the state’s allocation of scarce resources, the trial court should not second-guess the decisions of the stakeholders in allocating those resources. This does not mean that the trial court cannot consider the relative strength of any “new” evidence (i.e., whether the prosecutor’s asserted reason to charge now is pretextual), or whether the delay was truly related to the allocation of scarce resources (as opposed to a prosecutor simply choosing not to pursue the case). It is not enough for a prosecutor to simply state that they were generally busy with other cases. (See, e.g., Dickerson v. Superior Court (2019) 40 Cal.App.5th Supp. 1, 12 (Dickerson) [“There was absolutely no evidence submitted to the trial court to support the prosecution’s contention,” but only “the prosecutor in each case citing numbers that might reflect that the charging deputy district attorneys are, at times, overwhelmed by the workload.”]; Nelson, supra, 43 Cal.4th at p. 1254 [“ ‘A prosecutor is entitled to reasonable time in which to investigate an offense for the purpose of determining whether a prosecution is warranted.’ ” (italics added)].) Likewise, I do not read Nelson to suggest that a court cannot look beyond a prosecutor’s stated reason for filing charges when they did, or that the court must conclude the justification is strong any time the prosecutor points to any new evidence. Rather, the court in Nelson found the justification in that case was strong because it was a simple, straightforward case in which the state solved a true “cold case” by processing DNA evidence in a routine manner once the necessary technology and funding became available. Under those circumstances, the delay was investigative only, and “nothing else.” (Nelson, supra, 43 Cal.4th at p. 1256.) The Nelson court’s admonition against courts second-guessing a prosecutor’s prior decision not to charge a case in the past does not mean that

p. 765.) As here, the standard of review and procedural posture required the appellate court to accept the factual determinations of the trial court and draw all reasonable inferences in favor of the judgment. In Boyson, the district attorney asserted that the break in the case after a 22-year delay was “new fingerprint and forensic evidence.” (Boysen, supra, 165 Cal.App.4th at p. 780.) The court determined the prosecutor’s assertion was not credible because the new evidence “did not point to [Boysen] as the killer.” (Ibid.) Notably, the court did not make an overt credibility finding; rather, it commented on the strength of the forensic evidence, and concluded it provided no new insight as to the perpetrator. (Boysen, at p. 781.) The additional fingerprint evidence—matching fingerprints at the scene of the crime to a sergeant that investigated the murder—was “useful but does not in the least foreclose the possibility that someone else, perhaps gloved, also came through [the scene].” (Ibid.) Thus, although the prosecutor pointed to some new evidence and asserted that he believed it justified bringing the charges, the court looked past that subjective statement, and determined, based on the totality of evidence, that the prosecutor’s stated reliance on new evidence did not justify the delay. The same is true here. The evidence the prosecution relied on did not point to McInnis as the killer. It proved only that objects he had touched ended up at the scene of the carjacking and in the stolen car, all of which could be explained by his relationship with Thomas. The trial court therefore determined the evidence was of minimal probative value (just like the new fingerprint evidence in Boysen) and did not support the prosecutor’s subjective statement that the current charging decision was based entirely on new evidence. The trial court could have made a more direct credibility finding, but it was not required to do so. I believe this is what the court

People v. McInnis

CERTIFIED FOR PUBLICATION

COURT OF APPEAL, FOURTH APPELLATE DISTRICT

DIVISION ONE

STATE OF CALIFORNIA

THE PEOPLE, D082909

LEON DANIEL MCINNIS,

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