People v. Greene CA2/2

BACKGROUND

In 2019, appellant pleaded no contest to attempted murder. He further admitted that he had a prior strike conviction (§§ 667, subds. (b)–(i), 1170.12, subds. (a)–(e)), that he inflicted great bodily injury (§ 12022.7, subd. (a)), and that he personally used a deadly weapon (§ 12022, subd. (b)(1)). Appellant was sentenced to 17 years in state prison.

I. Preliminary Hearing

At the preliminary hearing on April 3, 2017, the victim testified that he drove to a parking lot to meet a woman he had been seeing (appellant’s codefendant) to retrieve the Mercedes he had lent her and to return her car that he had gotten repaired. When the victim got out of the car, appellant—who he had never met—jumped on him and stabbed him repeatedly in the face, head, and neck. He lost several teeth, required 120 staples in his head, and lost feeling in his lip and hand. A witness testified that he saw the stabbing through his apartment window, and that he saw a woman looking on as the attack occurred. The witness yelled at the perpetrator to leave the victim alone, at which point both the attacker and the woman fled the scene.

1 Undesignated statutory references are to the Penal…