First the Tale, Then the Bill

During the two decades he served in the state Assembly, Lou Papan often transformed his personal fixations and tragedies into California law.

The first law he ever wrote banned drivers from wearing headphones. He came up with the idea on his commute between the Bay Area and Sacramento as he noticed motorists deafly refusing to pull over for ambulances.

Papan led the legislative fight for lupus research after his wife was diagnosed as having it, and championed legal protections for the disabled, a group that included his son.

With a driving record that was less than spotless, Papan also used his legislative muscle to put the brakes on the California Highway Patrol’s efforts to expand the use of radar guns. In Sacramento, Papan’s intensity won him the nickname “Lead Foot Lou.”

Papan left Sacramento two years ago. But his style of legislating by anecdote is flourishing. When it comes to California lawmaking, the political is increasingly personal. Many of the 2,500 or so bills legislators draft each year are inspired by the experiences of friends, relatives and constituents, by newspaper headlines and occasionally even by themselves.

“What good is having 423,000 constituents if you can’t take advantage of what they know?” says Assemblyman Joe Simitian (D-Palo Alto), who has written five laws suggested by constituents through his annual “There Oughta Be a Law” contest.

In the current two-year legislative session, lawmakers have proposed penalizing anyone who has sex with a corpse; creating new legal protections for hate crime victims and their families; limiting the jail terms for law enforcement officials who accidentally shoot someone to death; and impounding cars to stop potentially dangerous drivers like the one who plowed into the Santa Monica Farmers’ Market last year. All of those bills were prompted by events with limited, if any, hard evidence that widespread problems were imminent.

“Unfortunately, most legislation is a function of slogan and anecdote,” said Atty. Gen. Bill Lockyer, a former Democratic state Senate president pro tem. “They start with their philosophy, and then there’s an anecdote that tries to prove the point.”

This type of lawmaking is hardly unique to California. But some political experts say changes in Sacramento’s culture over the last decade or so have made it much more pervasive.

A series of ballot initiatives have predetermined the ways in which much of the state’s money must be spent, robbing lawmakers of what used to be one of their central responsibilities. The deepening partisan divide in the Legislature has made large policy overhauls much harder. And with term limits and more rapid staff turnover, fewer legislators are in a position to brainstorm ideas from experience or institutional memory.

“There’s very little wiggle room for large policy modification in the Legislature,” said Barbara O’Connor, director of the Institute for the Study of Politics and Media at Cal State Sacramento. “Bills have increasingly become very surgical. One behavior, one incident, one thing, and members can get them through. They can’t do anything big, so they end up doing a lot of stuff that’s little.”

Indeed, few lawmakers are immune from finding the seeds of laws in particular incidents.

Despite Lockyer’s professed dislike for this kind of legislation, one of the laws he is most proud of sponsoring when he was in the Senate came from an irritated constituent. The law requires appliance stores to give a four-hour time estimate of when they will deliver purchases.

Sen. Tom Torlakson (D-Antioch) has written six anti-drunk-driving laws and proposed four more this year. He said his interest began when a repeat offender killed one of his former students at Antioch High School.

Assemblyman Joe Nation (D-San Rafael), who lost part of a leg to melanoma, this year proposed prohibiting most teenagers under 18 from patronizing tanning salons with ultraviolet rays. The Senate voted down the measure Friday.

Legislating by anecdote does not always make for perfect policy, however.

When lawmaker Rod Pacheco’s nephew was applying to college a few years ago, Pacheco discovered that California’s public universities were recalculating the boy’s weighted grades in several high school classes. “My nephew’s GPA went from 3.8 to 3.1,” he said.

So Pacheco, then a Republican assemblyman from Riverside, decided to do a little adjusting of his own. Back in Sacramento, he wrote a law prohibiting high schools from inflating grades except for honors courses approved by the state’s universities.

But Pacheco’s 2001 GPA law was repealed two years later, before it could even take effect. Schools complained it would be an administrative headache and would not accurately mimic the university systems’ grade calculations.

In recent years, criminal justice codes have become saturated with laws written in response to highly publicized crimes, particularly brutal ones. Nationwide, it has become commonplace for such laws to be named after the victim. As Megan’s Law (requiring the registration of sex offenders) and Amber Alert (which notifies the public of child abductions) have entered the popular consciousness, many lawmakers have sought out such circumstances with the knowledge that a harrowing story often helps the chance of passage.

This year, for instance, Assemblywoman Judy Chu (D-Monterey Park) is sponsoring “Kenny’s Law,” named for Kenneth Chiu, a Taiwanese American teenager stabbed to death by his neighbor, a white supremacist. The law would require judges to routinely issue orders of protection for victims of hate crimes and their families.

Chu acknowledged that courts are likely to provide such protection to any victim or family that requests it, but said she hoped her bill would “give a sense of security to this family, to families in general.”

Some of the crimes that California bills target are admittedly rare.

Last year, Assemblywoman Sharon Runner (R-Lancaster) proposed making sexual contact with a dead human body a felony. The bill was prompted by the treatment of the corpse of 4-year-old Robyn Gillett, which was fondled in a San Bernardino morgue by the man who had brought the body there.

Though the offender was successfully prosecuted under the state Health and Safety Code because of damage he had done to the corpse, Runner said last year that “by failing to make this heinous act a crime, we will only promote disrespect for the deceased.”

“Robyn’s Law” did not pass, but legislators are reconsidering it this year, after San Francisco authorities said they had no way to prosecute another corpse molester.

Other bills have been inspired by events that didn’t even occur in California. A 2000 law making it a crime to fail to report a murder, rape or assault against anyone under 14 was based on a murder in a Nevada casino. The victim, 7-year-old Sherrice Iverson, was from Los Angeles. Torlakson, the bill’s sponsor, said he hopes the law reminds bystanders of their responsibilities.

Many lawmakers say they are tired of these proposals, which come from Democrats and Republicans alike. “Both parties are guilty,” said Assemblyman Ray Haynes (R-Murrieta). “The idea that one person had a problem does not necessitate the fact that we have to have a whole code section in the law to deal with that issue.”

Most lawmakers strive to produce evidence that an individual incident is part of a broader trend or problem.

This year, Assemblyman Paul Koretz (D-West Hollywood) proposed a law relating to the fad known as “teak surfing,” in which swimmers hanging from the rear of a moving boat drop off to surf the wake. Koretz’s legislation outlaws boaters from running their engines while swimmers are hanging from the craft.

In justifying his bill, which also requires warning stickers, Koretz cited three deaths from engine carbon dioxide since 2000, and two lawsuits. But he also relied on research by federal health agencies.

Simitian said his annual “There Oughta Be a Law” contest has helped produce far better laws than he could dream up on his own.

Contest winners that became law include one requiring businesses in bankruptcy to honor gift certificates (suggested by an angry patron), and one requiring antifreeze sold in California to include a bittering agent. The law seeks to prevent accidental poisonings of children and pets and was introduced by Lauren Ward, a Los Altos Hills woman whose 6-month-old terrier died after lapping up antifreeze in a parking lot.

Not every tragedy can be effortlessly transformed into a legislative response, however.

After an elderly driver crashed into the Santa Monica Farmers’ Market last July, killing 10 people and injuring 63, the city’s state senator, Democrat Sheila Kuehl, sponsored a bill to make it easier for police to confiscate the cars of incompetent drivers.

She later dropped the bill after having second thoughts.

“I didn’t feel good about it,” she said. “It had really gotten away from any concerns that were raised by the Farmers’ Market that had to do with drivers who really shouldn’t be driving. I concluded that it was not legislation that we needed, but the DMV needed to institute more stringent testing.”

Other times, the ramifications of trying to address one incident become so expansive that the best-intentioned legislation becomes unworkable.

In 2002, Assemblyman Jay La Suer (R-La Mesa) wrote a bill to help pay for a local child prodigy to attend community college. Then-Gov. Gray Davis vetoed the measure, which would have authorized school districts to pay the college costs of “exceptionally gifted pupils” who would otherwise be in their schools. Davis’ veto message said the bill could have cost the state more than $1 million a year.

Sometimes, the motivating incident for a piece of legislation can end up being its undoing.

In February, the unions representing Los Angeles deputy sheriffs and county probation officers sponsored legislation that would exempt some law enforcement officials convicted of involuntary manslaughter from a state law that imposes longer prison sentences when a gun is used in the commission of a crime.

The bill’s impetus was the sentence given Daniel Riter, a former investigator for the Riverside district attorney’s office who shot the driver of a pickup truck while serving a custody warrant. Riter was sentenced to seven years in prison: two years for the killing and five more under the “use a gun, go to jail,” law, which was enacted to discourage illegal gun possession.

Law enforcement officials argued that it was unfair to tack on longer sentences for people who carry guns as part of their jobs. But relatives of Riter’s victim lobbied passionately against the bill, which died in a Senate committee in June.

Timothy Yaryan, lobbyist for the Assn. for Los Angeles Deputy Sheriffs, said too much of the debate centered on the Riverside incident, rather than the broader topic. “It’s kind of the downside of having anecdotal evidence,” he said.