Page 3
Court of Appeal:
Stalking Statute Doesn’t Require Direct Contact With Victim
Wiley Says Threats Conveyed to Relatives, as Intermediaries, Sufficed
By a MetNews Staff Writer
The Court of Appeal for this district has rejected the contention of a defendant who was convicted of stalking that he should only have been found guilty of an attempted crime because he did not send threats directly to the victim, but emailed them to her father and sister who forwarded the messages to her.
“[S]talkers who recklessly intend to threaten a victim incur full liability under the stalking statute, no matter how they do it,” Justice John Shepard Wiley Jr. of Div. Eight wrote in an opinion filed Friday.
The appellant, Kurt Brady Obermueller, was convicted of violating Penal Code §646.9(a) which provides:
“Any person who willfully, maliciously, and repeatedly follows or willfully and maliciously harasses another person and who makes a credible threat with the intent to place that person in reasonable fear for his or her safety, or the safety of his or her immediate family is guilty of the crime of stalking….”
Not Attempted Stalking
Wiley said:
“Left open is how the defendant conveys this threat. Stalkers can be imaginative. Obermueller used intermediaries to make credible threats against his victim, and that was completed stalking, not attempted stalking. The trial court thus properly declined to instruct on attempted stalking because no substantial evidence supported the lesser included offense.”
The jurist went on to reject the contention of instructional error by Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Nicole C. Bershon who did not give jurors the option of convicting the defendant of a lesser offense. He wrote:
“Threats conveyed only by messengers can be fully effective in terrorizing a target, as they were in this case. Obermueller’s tactic of confining his emails to Kathy B.’s father and sister was legally irrelevant so long as it was clear, as it was here, that Obermueller was recklessly aware of his statement’s threatening character. The lesser included offense instruction was irrelevant. The trial judge was right not to give it.”
‘Prom Kiss’
In one email to the father and sister, the defendant, who had known the victim in high school decades earlier, said that she “still owes me my prom kiss,” adding: “[S]orry I have to declare war on you all and I will seriously take you all down one by one....”
Some of the emails made mention of weapons.
Obermueller had previously been convicted of stalking the victim and was under a restraining order. That order did not cover the father and sister, Manhattan Beach attorneys William H. Keller and Jennifer Keller Smith, and the defendant thought he was at liberty to contact them.
“There was never a loophole,” Wiley said. “ A limitation on a restraining order is not a license to stalk.”
The case is People v. Obermueller, 2024 S.O.S. 2831.
Copyright 2024, Metropolitan News Company