High court cool to execution speedup
A central feature of a ballot measure aimed at speeding up executions in California — its requirement that the state Supreme Court decide all death penalty appeals within five years — got an apparent thumbs-down from the court’s justices Tuesday and drew little support even from the measure’s defenders, who sought to recast the mandate as a nonbinding guideline.
It was far less clear, however, whether the court planned to strike other provisions of the wide-ranging initiative, Proposition 66, which won in November with a 51 percent majority while the voters were also rejecting a rival measure, Proposition 62, to repeal the state’s death penalty law.
Condemned prisoners in California now wait more than 20 years, on average, for a final ruling on their appeals. Prosecutors and crime-victims’ groups who backed Proposition 66 told voters the measure would cut that period in half by requiring faster court action, limiting some types of appeals, and requiring more lawyers to accept capital cases.
One of its provisions said the state’s high court, which hears the appeals required by law in every death sentence, “shall” rule within five years of sentencing, more than twice as fast as its current pace. The same five-year deadline would apply to the second-stage appeals known as habeas corpus, which often focus on claims of misconduct by prosecutors or jurors and inadequate representation by defense lawyers.
At a hearing Tuesday in Los Angeles on a lawsuit seeking to overturn the entire measure, several justices suggested that such a timetable, if binding, would be unconstitutional.
A five-year deadline “may not be achievable without radically changing the ability of the courts to carry out their functions” in any cases other than death penalty appeals, said Justice Leondra Kruger.
Defenders of the measure countered that, despite the wording of Prop. 66, the five-year timetable was not mandatory. Deputy Attorney General Jose Zelidon-Zepeda noted that Prop. 66 did not specify any consequences, such as dismissal of the appeal, if the court took longer than five years to decide it.
“What the measure was trying to do was speed up the process” and encourage the court to eliminate unnecessary delays, Zelidon-Zepeda said. He noted that Prop. 66 directs the state Judicial Council to propose methods to handle capital cases more quickly and efficiently.
“That is a massive delegation of power to reorganize the third branch of government,” said Justice Goodwin Liu.
Kent Scheidegger, legal director of the Criminal Justice Legal Foundation and one of the authors of Prop. 66, told the court that a five-year timetable was achievable and that California courts were more willing than courts in other states to postpone death penalty hearings at defense lawyers’ requests. But he said the ballot measure “does acknowledge that the goal will not always be met.”
The justices seemed skeptical — “So it’s a mandatory deadline that’s toothless?” asked Kruger — but they also questioned the contention by opponents of Prop. 66 that eliminating the deadline should invalidate the entire measure.
The lawsuit was filed by the late John Van de Kamp, a former state attorney general, and Ron Briggs, a former El Dorado County supervisor whose father, state Sen. John Briggs, R-Fullerton (Orange County), sponsored the 1978 ballot measure that established the current death penalty law.
They argued that Prop. 66 violated a state constitutional rule limiting initiatives to a single subject — a position that drew no apparent support from the justices Tuesday — and that the five-year deadline, and other provisions, interfered with judicial authority and reduced safeguards against wrongful death verdicts.
“The voters were promised that they could make death penalty cases happen faster and cheaper and without killing ... any innocent people,” said the plaintiffs’ lawyer, Christina Von der Ahe Rayburn.
Noting that the court has a backlog of nearly 400 capital cases, Rayburn said Prop. 66 was drafted to require rulings within five years — in “very mandatory” language — and that it was uncertain that the voters would have passed it if they had been told the timeline was merely advisory.
But Liu told Rayburn that the willingness of Prop. 66 ’s defenders to recast the mandate as a guideline “removes a central pillar of your argument.”
“There’s still a lot more to it,” he said of the ballot measure.
Another provision seeks to reduce delays in capital cases by requiring defense lawyers to handle death penalty appeals if they accept other court assignments to represent criminal defendants. Rayburn argued that only the state’s high court is authorized to set standards for lawyers in death appeals, now handled only by lawyers with experience in death penalty or other murder cases.
Another change would eliminate the authority of a state administrative agency to review the legality, after considering public comment, of California’s proposed procedures for executions by a single drug, replacing the former three-drug procedure.
A ruling in Briggs vs. Brown, S238309, is due within 90 days.
“So it’s a mandatory deadline that’s toothless?” Leondra Kruger, California Supreme Court justice