P. v. Soto
On the morning of July 25, 2004, defendants Juan Lorenzo Soto and Francisco Javier Valenciano, Jr., along with Anthony Gonzales, drove from Watsonville to Santa Cruz to commit a robbery. They were armed with a shotgun and a pistol. The liquor store they intended to rob was too busy, so the three men decided to rob a group of men they had seen playing cards in a nearby driveway, with a pile of money on the ground. When Gonzales, armed with the shotgun, and Soto, armed with the pistol, approached the card players and directed them to hand over their money, all but one of them, Rodolfo Escobar, complied. Escobar instead insulted Gonzales, and picked up the money off the ground. As one of his friends implored him to cooperate with the gunmen, Escobar said he had to work hard for his money to support his family, and that if Gonzales wanted his money, he should “ask [his] mama for [it].†Gonzales pressed the shotgun against Escobar’s forehead and pulled the trigger, blowing off the top of his head. Gonzales and Soto collected the money off the ground, went back to the car, where Valenciano had been acting as a lookout, and drove off.
Following a jury trial, Soto and Valenciano[1] were convicted of conspiracy to commit robbery (Pen. Code, § 182, subd. (a)(1), count 1);[2] first degree murder (§ 187, subd. (a), count 2); second degree robbery of Escobar, Antonio Baires, Jose Edgardo Navarro, Gerardo Navarro and Jose Saul Ayala Baires (§ 211, counts 3-7); and attempted second degree robbery of Francisco Ayala and Manuel Ayala (§§ 664, 211, counts 8 & 9). The jury also found true the allegations that counts 2 through 9 were committed for the benefit of a criminal street gang (§ 186.22, subd. (b)(1)), that a principal personally discharged a firearm causing death as to counts 2 and 3 (§ 12022.53, subds. (d), (e)(1)), and that a principal personally used a firearm in the commission of counts 4 through 9 (id., subds. (b), (e)). Soto and Valenciano were each sentenced to total terms of 84 years to life, consisting of determinate terms of 34 years followed by indeterminate terms of 50 years to life.
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