Chief justice nominee’s rulings reflect no-nonsense approach

California’s newly nominated candidate for chief justice has issued rulings over a 20-year career on the bench that reflect a no-nonsense jurist who applies the law with an even hand and a narrow focus.

Though little known outside state judicial circles before her nomination Wednesday, Tani Cantil-Sakauye has issued rulings on important questions of constitutional rights and environmental protection, defining new limits and responsibilities while seldom stirring controversy or claims of bias.

The 50-year-old judge’s most attention-grabbing decision might have been her 2001 ruling in Sacramento County Superior Court that upheld the validity of an arrest warrant for a rapist issued without a name, only a genetic code from DNA evidence. Acknowledging that she was wading into “uncharted waters,” Cantil-Sakauye said breakthroughs in forensic science allowed the courts to identify suspects in new and definitive ways that should pass constitutional scrutiny. The suspect, Paul Robinson, was identified through a DNA sample that had been taken from the victim and became the first person in the nation arrested on a DNA warrant.

Robinson was convicted and sentenced to 65 years in prison. His appeal reached the California Supreme Court in January and the conviction was upheld against his challenge of the DNA warrant.

In her 12 years on the 3rd District Court of Appeal, which spans 23 counties in the largely rural northeastern reaches of the state, Cantil-Sakauye has weighed in on numerous environmental and natural resource issues. She has at times sided with development advocates, as in a Siskiyou County case in which she rejected the need for an environmental review of a 100-year contract with Nestle to provide water for a bottling company.

However, in a Colusa County case four years ago in which the state sought to convert 225 acres of farmland into wetlands, the judge ruled that the project wasn’t exempt from an environmental impact assessment. And in 2007, she overruled a trial court’s dismissal of a lawsuit on procedural grounds and reinstated the action brought against plans to build a Wal-Mart supercenter in Lodi.

Cantil-Sakauye has reached back into state history and Western culture in deciding land use conflicts, as in a challenge brought by a Plumas County property owner who argued that a neighbor’s livestock grazing on his land amounted to an unconstitutional “taking.” The judge looked beyond a 1919 uncodified statute that allowed seizure of stray livestock to cite the region’s practice during the 1800s of requiring those who didn’t want grazing on their land to erect fences.

On social issues, the judge’s track record brooks little discernible political leaning. She rejected the contention of a woman with a gifted son that the state was obliged to pay for the 13-year-old to go to college because he had already completed high school coursework. The judge dissented from a 3rd District panel ruling last year that Sacramento wasn’t liable in a sexual assault case involving two city firefighters. She also deemed that a man who broke into his family home was guilty of burglary after he voluntarily surrendered his keys to the wife, who threw him out.

Cantil-Sakauye has displayed a common-sense approach to applying the law, ruling last year that a defendant was improperly convicted on three counts of murder in a case with a single victim. She also overturned a ruling against a 16-year-old boy who had sent nasty text messages to his former girlfriend, judging that the messages were angry and vulgar but not criminally threatening or obscene.

In January 2007, the judge ruled that a UC Davis plastic surgeon was a public figure for the limited purpose of dismissing his claim to having been defamed by a former patient unhappy with the results of her eyebrow lift. Surgeon Jonathan Sykes had countersued Georgette Gilbert after she augmented her malpractice complaint with a website display of before- and after-pictures and reports by others who alleged to have suffered botched procedures.

carol.williams@latimes.com