Coram Vobis

Chaganti v. Superior Court, No. H048373 (D6 Dec. 27, 2021)

This one’s unusual. The underlying case is a real estate dispute between a plaintiff/landlord—who is pro se—and a defendant/tenant, which appears to be a cellphone store owned by a subsidiary of AT&T. The trial court granted AT&T summary adjudication of two claims on statute of limitations grounds. Two other claims were tried to a jury, resulting in a defense verdict. That judgment is on appeal.

While that appeal was pending, however, the trial judge who granted summary adjudication filed a disclosure that he owned stock in AT&T worth between $10,000 and $100,000. (The judge did not make the disclosure in prior years because he previously owned Time Warner stock that was exchanged with AT&T stock in a merger that closed before the summary adjudication ruling.) Plaintiff discovered the disclosure and tried to bring that to the court’s attention through several procedural avenues. He ultimately filed an original petition for a writ of coram vobis with the Court of Appeal, which the Court grants.

Coram nobis and coram vobis are old school common law writs that are used to attack a final judgment for reasons unrelated to the merits of the action—most often for extrinsic fraud. When filed in trial court, the writ is called coram nobis; when filed in an appellate court, coram vobis. Although primarily used as a means of collateral attack in criminal cases, both writs are available in civil cases as well. But civil coram nobis and vobis are extremely rare. 

To obtain either writ, the petitioner must establish: (1) the existence of some fact that would have prevented the entry of judgment on the merits; (2) that does not go to the merits of the underlying case on any issue that was actually tried; and (3) that the petitioner could not have discovered the facts at some earlier time in the exercise of diligence. The case law also requires a lack of other remedies—if the issue could have been raised in the trial court—like on a new trial motion or motion to reconsider—or on a direct appeal, relief by writ is not appropriate.

The Court finds each element satisfied. Any act by a judge who was subject to mandatory disqualification is void. Code of Civil Procedure § 170.1(3)(A) requires a judge to disqualify when he or she “has a financial interest in the subject matter in a proceeding or in a party to the proceeding.” Section 170.5(b) defines “financial interest” as a legal or equitable ownership of 1 percent in a party or an interest valued at $1,500 or more. There is some question about whether the judge’s interest in the public AT&T corporation counts as an interest in the AT&T subsidiary that is the defendant in the case. The argument rests on a 90-year old Supreme Court case holding a judge’s having money on deposit at a parent corporation didn’t count as an interest in a subsidiary party. But that case was decided under a different statute with different language and given the purpose of the rule—avoiding the appearance of impropriety—the court finds that the trial judge was financially interested.

So far as the other elements go, a trial judge’s conflict of interest doesn’t go to the merits. The information could not have been found earlier because the first disclosure was the one Plaintiff discovered. Finally, Plaintiff had no other avenue for relief. The trial court lost jurisdiction when Plaintiff filed his notice of appeal, and the issue couldn’t be addressed in the pending appeal because the disclosure was not in the trial record.

Writ granted. Trial court ordered to vacate the summary adjudication ruling as well as the final judgement it was baked into.