Rose Bird’s Interview

Chief Justice Bird has somehow concluded that a conspiracy exists to end her tenure on the court. In fact, our Constitution requires citizens to pass on her stewardship, and California prosecutors--with many others--are speaking out. Her name would be on the ballot if we didn’t lift a finger.

Prosecutors oppose her retention because she has been unable to set aside her personal ideology when interpreting the laws and Constitution of the state. We oppose her and two associate justices because the California Supreme Court--only a dozen year ago considered the best in the nation--is now the object of derision.

Bird’s claim of some plot is really another reason to vote against her. The U.S. attorney general has never said a word on this subject publicly, and has never discussed it with members of the California District Attorneys Assn. The people she decribes as “bully boys” are the men and women, Democrats and Republicans, who prosecute criminal cases in the courtrooms. And we have witnessed the concept of justice frustrated by delay and trivialized by a refusal to follow the letter and spirit of the law.

Prosecutors are familiar with the technique of putting someone else on trial--the police, the victim, a witness, even the road and weather and phases of the moon. The chief justice’s assertion that Atty. Gen. Edwin Meese III and the “bully boys” are after her is made of the same cloth.

We take no pleasure in opposing justices on the Supreme Court. We have never done it before, and the necessity to do it now saddens us. But as public officials with a special duty to follow the law and with a sensitivity to victims of crime and their families, we have an obligation to participate in this urgent discussion. We will settle for evaluating Chief Justice Bird on the merits of her performance.

CECIL HICKS

Santa Ana

Hicks is district attorney of Orange County and vice president of the California District Attorneys Assn.