The California Supreme Court has thrown out a woman’s decade-old guilty plea, ruling that signing a standard immigration warning form during a criminal case isn’t enough to prove a defendant truly understood she could lose her legal status in the country.
The decision, handed down Thursday, centers on Angela Hernandez, a Mexican citizen who had lived in the United States as a legal permanent resident for 19 years before her 2013 arrest in Kern County on two drug charges. At the time, Hernandez was 55 years old with a father, husband, children and grandchildren all living in the U.S.
During her trial, Hernandez pleaded guilty and initialed a standard form warning that a non-citizen’s guilty plea could lead to deportation, exclusion from re-entry, or denial of naturalization. An interpreter certified that the document had been fully translated for her, and her defense attorney later told the court he believed she understood what she was signing.
But Hernandez maintains she never grasped what those consequences actually meant for her future.
“Well, because if he’s my attorney and he’s telling me, ‘Sign here, initial here,’ I’m going to sign,” Hernandez told the court, according to the ruling. “I was really nervous then too.”
Her plea resulted in a 180-day sentence, of which she served 27 days. Two years later, believing she had done nothing wrong by seeking permission, Hernandez asked the state probation department for approval to travel to Mexico — and received it. But when she tried to return home through Los Angeles International Airport, a customs official detained her and launched deportation proceedings.
Since that encounter, Hernandez has fought in court to have her original conviction reversed, arguing her attorney had failed her by not making sure she truly understood what she was agreeing to. Both a trial judge and an appellate court rejected her claims. The state’s highest court, however, saw it differently.
Writing for the majority, Justice Joshua Groban said Hernandez’s own actions after the plea — seeking permission to travel abroad, actually leaving the country, and then attempting to re-enter through an official port of entry — undercut any suggestion that she grasped the seriousness of what she’d agreed to.
“Her decisions to seek and obtain permission from the probation department to leave the United States, to travel to Mexico, and to attempt to lawfully reenter through a port of entry support an inference that she did not ‘meaningfully understand’ the immigration consequences of her conviction,” Groban wrote.
The ruling emphasized that simply checking boxes on a legal form isn’t sufficient — courts must be confident a defendant genuinely comprehends what a guilty plea could mean for their immigration status, not just that they verbally agreed to it in the moment.
The California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation had asked the court to leave Hernandez’s conviction intact. But public defender organizations and immigrant rights groups weighed in on her behalf, telling the court that California’s trial courts have applied inconsistent standards when informing defendants about the immigration risks tied to plea deals.
The Supreme Court has now ordered the 5th District Court of Appeals to send the case back to a trial court, which must vacate Hernandez’s convictions.
Justice Carol Corrigan, in a partial dissent, argued that Hernandez should still have to lay out a more complete case when her matter returns to the lower court.
“The trial court can resolve factual and credibility issues, then make a proper ruling considering all the relevant evidence,” Corrigan wrote. “If the record produced shows that legal error damaged her ability to meaningfully understand the immigration consequences of her plea and accept them, the motion should be granted.”
The case is likely to resonate with immigration attorneys and public defenders across the Inland Empire and greater Southern California, where large numbers of legal permanent residents navigate the criminal justice system each year — often without fully understanding how a single guilty plea can upend decades of life built in the United States.
Original source: CalMatters
