Reported / Citable
Background
Christopher Cofer faced five separate criminal prosecutions arising from a string of burglaries and related offenses in Monterey County. Over the course of about eighteen months, he cycled in and out of custody in the various cases — sometimes out on bail in an earlier case while simultaneously held on a later one. He ultimately resolved all five matters through a plea agreement and was sentenced at a single hearing in March 2022.
At sentencing, the trial court awarded Cofer the days he had actually spent in custody in each individual case against that case’s sentence. Cofer argued he was entitled to far more: under Penal Code section 2900.5, he contended that because all five cases were disposed of at one hearing, they were all part of the same “proceedings,” and therefore any day he spent in custody in any of the five cases should reduce the sentence in every one of them. That interpretation would have given him over 300 additional custody days.
The Court of Appeal agreed with Cofer, reasoning that a single sentencing hearing collapsed all five prosecutions into a single proceeding for credit purposes. The California Supreme Court granted review to resolve the conflict with an earlier appellate decision.
The Court’s Holding
The Supreme Court reversed unanimously. Applying conventional statutory analysis to Penal Code section 2900.5, the Court held that “proceedings,” as used in subdivision (b), means an individual criminal case — not all cases that happen to be sentenced together on the same day. Each prosecution retains its separate identity regardless of how it is scheduled for sentencing.
The Court reaffirmed its longstanding “strict causation” rule: custody credit is awarded only for time directly attributable to the specific case being sentenced. The fact that a defendant and prosecutor agree to handle five matters at one hearing is a logistical convenience, not a substantive merger that transforms five distinct criminal proceedings into a single one. Awarding global credit across unrelated cases would be an unearned windfall, not a principled application of the statute.
The Court specifically rejected the Court of Appeal’s equity argument — that cross-case credit would equalize treatment between defendants who can and cannot post bail. That policy choice belongs to the Legislature, not the courts interpreting an unambiguous statutory term.
Key Takeaways
- Custody credits under Penal Code section 2900.5 remain tethered to the specific case in which the custody occurred — even when multiple cases are plea-bargained and sentenced at the same hearing.
- Defense counsel negotiating global plea deals should not assume that a joint sentencing hearing will expand custody credit across all matters; each case is still evaluated independently.
- The decision resolves the split between People v. Jacobs (case-specific approach) and the Court of Appeal’s Cofer majority (single-hearing merger theory), firmly settling the issue in favor of the case-specific rule.
- Prosecutors can now resist demands for cross-case credit with binding Supreme Court authority, reducing litigation over credit calculations in multi-case dispositions.
- The ruling does not change the rule that credit accrued while simultaneously in custody on multiple cases (overlapping custody) is credited only once against concurrent sentences — that is governed by the second sentence of subdivision (b).
Why It Matters
Multi-case plea dispositions are common in California’s trial courts. Defendants facing several pending cases often negotiate omnibus deals that resolve everything at once. Before this decision, there was genuine uncertainty — and real risk — that a court might import the Court of Appeal’s expansive interpretation and order substantial additional credit. The Supreme Court’s unanimous ruling eliminates that uncertainty and gives trial courts, prosecutors, and defense attorneys a clear, workable rule: count the days in the case, not the days in the courtroom.
For criminal defense practitioners, the practical lesson is to focus presentence credit disputes on the actual custody timeline within each individual case, and to negotiate credit questions explicitly in plea agreements rather than relying on a later merger argument. For prosecutors and court staff calculating credits, the decision is a green light to proceed as trial courts have historically done — case by case, not hearing by hearing.