Maura Dolan reports in today’s Los Angeles Times on the Supreme Court writ petition challenging Proposition 66, the initiative passed in November to speed up California’s death penalty process. The Supreme Court has stayed the new law’s implementation while the court allows preliminary briefing on whether it should decide the writ petition on the merits, which would involve further briefing and an oral argument. Preliminary oppositions to the petition are due tomorrow.
The Times article notes varying views of the effect on the Supreme Court’s docket of a fully implemented Proposition 66. One law professor says the court would be spending virtually all its time on death penalty cases. Another, however, says that judges “sit on them because they don’t like the death penalty,” not “because they are overwhelmed with work.”
Chief Justice Tani Cantil-Sakauye said last year — and the year before — that 25 percent of the court’s resources are spent on automatic death penalty appeals and related habeas corpus petitions. And that’s without the unprecedented and extreme speed up that Proposition 66 would require. To claim that the justices are “sitting on” death penalty cases out of animosity to capital punishment is a fact-free slur. Regardless of that, however, the increase in death penalty appeals and habeas petitions the court would have to decide to comply with Proposition 66’s time limits would, as the first law professor predicts, probably leave the court with the ability to handle little else.