Opinion
NOT TO BE PUBLISHED
Super. Ct. No. 07F06910
ROBIE, J.
A jury found defendant Jeffrey Powell guilty of first degree burglary. The trial court sustained a recidivist allegation, and found that he violated probation in two cases unrelated to this appeal. It sentenced him to state prison concurrently on the three cases.
On appeal, defendant contends the evidence is insufficient to sustain the jury’s verdict. We shall affirm.
FACTS
On the morning of May 24, 2007, the victims (a husband and wife) left their home separately, going respectively to work and to the doctor. Their housekeeper arrived around lunchtime. She was surprised to see that items normally left on the kitchen windowsill were on the counter, which was unusual. She assumed the wife must have moved them to clean the sill. She did not clean the sill or touch the window screen. She did not notice anything else amiss in the home. The kitchen window was on the side of the house, toward the rear, within the fenced yard. The wife came home about one-half hour later. The housekeeper remarked that she was proud of the wife for cleaning the sill (though the wife in fact had not moved anything from the sill). The wife did not recall seeing anything amiss around the home on her return.
When the husband returned from work in the late afternoon, he went to take the trash cans out. He was surprised to discover that the dead bolt in the door, accessible only from the interior, was unlocked because he was a “stickler about locking dead bolts and keeping the house secure.” He, too, thought it unusual that the items normally on the sill were on the counter, but assumed the housekeeper had moved them. The window was also unlocked, which he again attributed to either the housekeeper or his wife.
On June 3, 2007, the husband first noticed that two handguns and a coin sorter were missing from his nightstand drawer. He last recalled seeing them during a visit from his daughter in early May 2007. Nothing else appeared to be missing, and there did not appear to be any other site of an attempted entry. He reported the loss to the police, and mentioned the incident with the sill. At the time of his report, he also told the officer that he had noticed the window screen was askew, but he could not recall this at trial. The officer did not see signs of any point of entry other than the window. The officer noticed palm and fingerprints on the window and requested the services of a forensic technician.
The technician retrieved a number of prints from the window. He did not process the nightstand for fingerprints because he assumed that the husband would have frequently touched it with overlaying prints, and he did not see any usable prints in a visual inspection of the surfaces of the nightstand.
On the following day, the investigating officer overheard another officer talking about arresting a prowler in a side yard three blocks from the home of the victims. That officer had responded to a call at 10:20 a.m. After viewing the caller’s surveillance footage of the prowler in a neighbor’s yard, the officer made contact with the suspect a few blocks away, who identified himself as defendant Jeffrey Powell. Defendant first claimed to have been looking for a lost dog, then said he was searching for a girlfriend’s residence, then asserted he had seen a bicycle in a backyard while looking for the girlfriend’s home, which he had thought about stealing but had decided not to do it.
Obtaining defendant’s identifying evidence from the other officer, including his fingerprint exemplars, the investigating officer gave this to the forensic technician, who determined that two of the prints from the exterior of the kitchen window matched defendant. Neither of the victims nor their housekeeper were familiar with defendant or had ever asked him to come to the home.
Upon being informed on his arrest about the fingerprints, defendant (who lived on the same street as the victims with his mother) asserted that the Neighborhood Watch and a neighboring police officer were out to get him. The stolen items were not in defendant’s home. The police never recovered them.
Defense counsel moved to dismiss the case at the close of the prosecution’s case. The court denied the motion. The defense then rested without calling witnesses.
DISCUSSION
Although People v. Johnson (1980) 26 Cal.3d 557 is most often cited for the premise of resolving all conflicts in the evidence or inferences in favor of the People (id. at p. 576), it also includes the admonition that we must determine if a reasonable trier of fact could have found a defendant guilty. (Id. at pp. 577-578.) To that end, we must discern if the evidence is “substantial,” i.e., “reasonable, credible, and of solid value.” (Id. at p. 578.) Inferences may constitute substantial evidence in support of a judgment if they are the probable outcome of logic applied to direct evidence; mere speculative possibilities or conjectures, on the other hand, are not sufficient. (Kuhn v. Department of General Services (1994) 22 Cal.App.4th 1627, 1633; Louis & Diederich, Inc. v. Cambridge European Imports, Inc. (1987) 189 Cal.App.3d 1574, 1584-1585; People v. Berti (1960) 178 Cal.App.2d 872, 876.) Whether inferences rationally flow from the evidence is a question of law. (California Shoppers, Inc. v. Royal Globe Ins. Co. (1985) 175 Cal.App.3d 1, 44-45; Berti, at p. 876.)
Although defendant does not dispute that there is evidence of theft, he argues it is only speculation that anyone entered the victims’ home on May 24 with the intent to commit a theft, because there was an absence of any evidence of forced entry, nothing else was amiss in the home, and there is nothing to tie the disappearance of the property with that date. He also asserts that only speculation connects him with the interior of the home or the date on which the property disappeared.
Defendant does not provide any legal basis for his repeated reference to the lack of any evidence of forced entry, which is not an element of the crime of burglary. (People v. Wallace (2008) 44 Cal.4th 1032, 1060.) Therefore, it does not matter that neither of the victims testified about whether they had locked or unlocked the window before leaving the home, as it was not necessary to prove (as he seems to assert) that “a door or window had been unlocked from the outside.” (In any event, the evident need to remove the screen before climbing through the window meant there was some resistance to anyone’s entry through it.)
Putting this unmeritorious suggestion aside, the inference that an intruder entered the residence in the absence of its authorized occupants is rational. None of the authorized occupants removed the items from the sill, and the dead bolt in the garage door could be unfastened only from the inside. Therefore, someone had to have been inside the house in the absence of the authorized occupants to perform these actions.
It is immaterial that the intruder did not leave signs of rummaging through the belongings of the occupants. Even if the intruder had not taken any property, the unauthorized presence in the home of a stranger is itself sufficient to support an inference of an entry with an intent to steal, “such being the usual intent under these circumstances” (People v. Soto (1879) 53 Cal. 415, 416; accord People v. Martone (1940) 38 Cal.App.2d 392, 394), which is all that is necessary to sustain a conviction for burglary (People v. Montoya (1994) 7 Cal.4th 1027, 1041-1042).
This leaves his claim that it is mere speculation that the property of the victims disappeared on the date of the entry through the window. However, on the evidence presented to the jury, this was the only time that an unknown person had been in the home between the last time the husband remembered seeing the guns in early May and his discovery that they were missing on June 3. It would be speculation that the items were taken at some other time. The inference that the intruder took them was rational.
As we have rejected defendant’s claim of inadequate proof of an unlawful entry and taking, our rejection of his alternate argument regarding inadequate proof of his identity as the intruder is succinct. “[E]vidence of a fingerprint... at a point of unusual access is alone sufficient to support a burglary conviction.” (People v. Bailes (1982) 129 Cal.App.3d 265, 282.) Defendant attempts to distinguish the case as involving sufficient proof of an entry at the time property was taken, leaving only the need to identify the burglar. The present case has sufficient circumstantial evidence of the former, so the presence of his fingerprints is sufficient to identify him.
Defendant argues that it is necessary to show that a defendant’s prints were not present before a crime in order to infer that the defendant left the prints at the time of the crime. Here, by contrast, the kitchen window was neither an item nor a location to which defendant ever had any authorized access. Therefore, it is rational to infer that he left the prints at the time of the burglary.
People v. Trevino (1985) 39 Cal.3d 667, 696-697 [print on furniture insufficient where defendant previous visitor to the home]; People v. Figueroa (1992) 2 Cal.App.4th 1584, 1588 [print on window sufficient where previous visit to apartment was before cleaning of window]; Birt v. Superior Court (1973) 34 Cal.App.3d 934, 936-938 [print on lighter in rental vehicle involved in burglary was insufficient; no showing when lighter left there].)
Finally, defendant asserts that federal law compels a conclusion that the evidence is insufficient to support the verdict. We do not need to address these decisions of various subordinate federal courts that he cites in his brief, as none of them are controlling authority. (People v. Crittendon (1994) 9 Cal.4th 83, 120, fn. 3.)
DISPOSITION
The judgment is affirmed.
We concur: BLEASE, Acting P. J., HULL, J.