One of the themes of Special Directives is that convicted defendants continue to return to the trial court asking for relief from their lengthy sentences. Pearl Sinthia Fernandez is another example of this judicial merry-go-round.

Fernandez pled guilty in 2018 to the first-degree murder of her 8-year-old son who was the victim of inhuman child abuse. I will spare you the details, but the abuse was horrific. Fernandez was sentenced to life without the possibility of parole.

Thanks to the largesse of the California Legislature's unrelenting drive to reopen criminal cases, Fernandez has twice asked the trial judge to set aside her guilty plea. The savvy judge denied both requests, making clear Fernandez was stuck with her guilty plea. The judge had earlier described Fernandez's conduct as animalistic. 

Fernandez is yet another example of the lack of finality in criminal cases. Every time another goofy idea pops into the heads of the Legislature, another round of hearings is forced on the trial courts. 

It is bad enough that the victim's relatives had to relive the horror of Fernandez's and her husband's brutal killing of their son at the court hearings in 2018.  Now, thanks to the Legislature, they had to twice return years later to oppose Fernandez's attempts to avoid responsibility. 

The Legislature has turned the criminal courts into a three-ring circus by inviting challenges to sentences sometimes decades-old. Enough is enough.