The People, Plaintiff and Respondent v. Seth Cravens, Defendant and Appellant — Liu, J., Concurring

Summary

Justice Liu concurred to explain that the objective component of implied malice requires a probabilistic assessment of whether the defendant's act involved a sufficiently high likelihood of death, while the subjective component requires conscious disregard for human life. Liu cautioned that the court's reliance on the alternative formulation could suggest, without deciding, that the higher-probability formulation was disfavored, and concluded that the circumstances fell just within the outer bounds of the alternative test. Justice Kennard, dissenting, would have upheld the Court of Appeal's reduction of the conviction because the evidence did not establish either objective or subjective implied malice.