Early Head-to-Head Confrontation on Election That’s a Year Away : Bird Foe, Ally Stage Preview of Action to Come

To retain or reject Rose Elizabeth Bird? Two of the most important figures in the campaign over the future of California’s chief justice debated this weekend whether California is a safer or more dangerous place because of her, whether she approaches her duty with courage or arrogance and whether victims in society should applaud or fear her.

Representing Bird was former State Bar President Anthony Murray, chairman of the Committee to Conserve the Courts. On the other side was Kern County Dist. Atty. Edward R. Jagels, chairman of the steering committee for the Crime Victims for Court Reform, a group seeking the ouster of Bird and Associate Justices Joseph R. Grodin and Cruz Reynoso.

The forum was KNBC’s “News Conference,” taped over the weekend for airing next Sunday. And the intensity of the clash between these two courtroom professionals might leave one thinking that the election was a week away, not a year away.

Murray drew a picture of a brave jurist unwilling to bend on principle and determined to make sure that elements of California’s death penalty law are constitutional and that capital cases are properly handled before executions are allowed to take place.

“She, of course, knows what would be in her political interest,” Murray said. “She knows all she has to do is affirm a death sentence and she will diffuse this whole issue. She has had remarkable courage. She has said, ‘I’m not going to surrender to people like these politicians. I’m going to continue to do my duty as long as I’m here as chief justice. I’m going to decide these cases on the facts and the law.’

“Now that’s the kind of judge that we should applaud. We should be thanking heaven that we have that kind of justice in the state.”

Jagels portrayed Bird as an unyielding liberal bent on personalizing justice to suit her own ideas.

Jagels said: “What I want is the same ability to protect the victim, the same ability to do something for public safety that the criminal justice systems in the other states have. I don’t want an extreme, pro-criminal criminal justice system of the sort we have now. . . .”

He said cases that the California Supreme Court has made impossible to prosecute “would be getting convictions in any other state, where we had fair, balanced rules, where the victim and the prosecution had a fair chance. We don’t have it here because the California Supreme Court is waging ideological war on any statute they don’t like.”

In the past, the pro and con sides in the retention election campaign have skirmished long-distance with statistics designed to show variously that Bird was soft or tough on crime. This was an early chance for leaders to join this statistical battle face to face.

Said Murray: “Ninety percent of the people who are charged with a crime in a courtroom in this state are convicted. Ninety percent of those convictions, when they’re appealed, are upheld on appeal. The state prisons are burgeoning and exploding with population so they really cannot put another single person in there. They’ve got them in tents; they’ve got them on the roofs; the county jails are exploding with population.”

‘Utterly Deceitful Figure’

Said Jagels: “This 90% figure is an utterly deceitful figure. Let’s understand very clearly what we’re talking about. Of the criminal cases that the Supreme Court accepts for review, Rose Bird votes for the defendant and against the victim and the people 88% of the time.”

Jagels, however, did not dispute that the court upholds 90% of the total appealed convictions by refusing to hear great numbers of cases.

He said, however, “The only cases that matter are the ones the Supreme Court writes an opinion about because they are the only ones that affect thousands and thousands of future cases. . . . The bottom line is there are thousands of criminals in California on the streets who would be convicted in any other jurisdiction under rules of law.”

Afterward, a spokesman for the pro-Bird Committee to Conserve the Courts said there is no evidence that criminals walk the street in California who would be jailed elsewhere and that Jagels’ claim to the contrary is “political rhetoric with no basis in fact.”

Imprisonment of Criminals

Both debaters agreed that California imprisons large numbers of criminals. Murray said the per-capita rate is higher in California than anywhere except South Africa and the U.S.S.R.; Jagels said California ranked fifth in the nation.

The two also agreed that the forthcoming election should be more than a referendum on the death penalty.

Murray called the court’s record on capital punishment “a completely false issue” and went on to direct attention to Bird’s record in civil lawsuits.

“The chief justice has the most remarkable record as a progressive and as a champion of the rights of victims . . .” Murray said. “The people who really need this court are the people who are injured on the street, who are injured on the job, the people who are elderly, the people who really need their day in court.”

Jagels said other important law-and-order statutes besides the death penalty are under attack by the high court. In particular, he drew attention to a recent ruling that trial courts are not bound by a voter-approved initiative declaring that judges “shall” add five years to the sentence of repeat offenders of serious felonies.

“The Supreme Court simply decided we don’t like that statute, we will figure out a way to evade it, and literally thousands of serious criminals will be doing much less time because lenient judges will have the opportunity not to give them the additional five years,” Jagels said.

Arguably the harshest statements of the 30-minute debate were reserved for how each campaign organization views the other.

‘100% Political’

Murray said: “The attacks on the courts this year are 100% political. This so-called crime victims group that Mr. Jagels represents is no more a crime victims group than this station is. It is run by a man named Bill Roberts, who has long been a supporter of Republican political causes. He was Gov. (George) Deukmejian’s campaign manager. He was Ronald Reagan’s campaign manager. . . . This group is a partisan right-wing Republican operation run by Mr. Bill Roberts, who has always been a Republican and never will be anything else.”

Jagels responded: “Mr. Roberts is our political consultant. But in fact 2,000 of the 12,000 people who have signed up for our committee are in fact crime victims. . . . The professionals, if you like, and the big money are all on the side of Rose Bird. Ninety percent of the half-million dollars that she’s thus far collected comes from lawyers with a direct financial stake in the preservation of the ideological majority on the California Supreme Court.”