Cal. Supreme Court to Review "Estes" Robbery

The Cal. Supreme Court granted review today in People v. Gomez, no. S140612, which presents the question of whether a robbery is committed when the property is taken outside the presence of the victim (i.e. without force or fear), but the defendant used force or fear in resisting the victim's attempts to regain possession of the property or in removing the property from the owner's immediate presence.

The Court of Appeal opinion, authored by Justice Bedsworth, can be read here and starts like this: 

The law libraries of this state are all lined with hundreds of linear feet of official reporters – testament in large measure to the bottomless ingenuity of what Justice Gardner called “the contemporary criminal culture.” (People v. Benton (1978) 77 Cal.App.3d 322, 324, fn. 1 [perhaps the best footnote in the history of appellate literature].) That ingenuity and the vagaries of random chance combine here to present still another in the apparently endless number of variations on the theme of Penal Code section 211. Here, we deal with the permutation that has become known as an “Estes robbery.”

Cal.