The changing face of the California Supreme Court was discussed by its chief justice in an interview with KQED.
Chief Justice Tani Cantil-Sakauye commented on Gov. Jerry Brown’s appointment of three inexperienced justices to the state’s top court. She said she thought the governor was looking for “new thinkers, bigger thinkers” on the bench. “It’s a diversity of sorts he’s looking for.”
The court spends about 25 percent of its time on death penalty appeals, the chief justice told KQED’s senior correspondent, Scott Shafer.
“It is difficult to say it (capital punishment) is working, And there’s no talk in the state Legislature of fixing it,” she said.
Fixing it would mean allocating more public money to expedite appeals and reduce the average wait time of 20 years between convictions and executions, KQED concluded.
There has not been an execution since the 2006 execution of Clarence Ray Allen. There are approximately 750 condemned on California’s Death Row.
According to KQED, the last thing state Democrats want is faster executions.
Since becoming chief justice, Cantil-Sakauye has seen the high court shift leftward. When Republican Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger chose her to replace retiring Chief Justice Ronald George in 2010, the court had one member appointed by a Democratic governor, Carlos Moreno.
During Cantil-Sakauye’s first week on the job, Moreno announced he was leaving the high court, possibly because he was not appointed chief justice, KQED said. Gov. Brown replaced Moreno with University of California at Berkeley law professor Goodwin Liu, whose nomination to the federal bench was blocked by Republicans.
According to the report, “when George retired in the middle of the 2010 gubernatorial election, he said he was stepping down so his replacement would be named by Schwarzenegger rather than Brown, who was widely favored to win.”
Since then, Brown has named two more associate justices, Stanford law professor Mariano-Floretino Cuellar, and federal government attorney Leondra Kruger.
None of Brown’s nominees had any previous experience as judges, and all three are Yale Law School graduates.
Cantil-Sakauye stated that Liu was “a wonderful colleague and brilliant.” As for the other two latest additions to the court she added, “…they appear so far to be very deferential to the trial courts and understanding of their role.”
–By Salvador Solorio
