Brown’s Views on Supreme Court

I am writing to you regarding Edmund G. Brown Jr.’s article (Opinion, March 2), “Law Versus Mood: a Case for the Supreme Court.”

Former Gov. Brown should be thanked for reminding us of the time-tested ideas that have formed a very stable foundation for the most successful government in the history of mankind.

On the other hand, he is way off base when he suggests that the terror that the California citizenry has for the murder rampage that we have seen lately can be dismissed as “popular passion.”

And as to Chief Justice Rose Elizabeth Bird’s decisions not being “significantly different from those of her predecessors or many of her colleagues . . .,” I find that, to the contrary, her decisions are radically different, in that she is the only justice who has consistently found defects in lower court procedures in capital cases that have risen to the Supreme Court. Not one single other justice has that distinction.

And as for Brown’s explanation of this, that “she stands apart”: I say, “she stands too far apart from reality,” and if Brown would like to consider that as an attack on the independence of the judiciary, then I have to say that he has a problem with semantics. LUIS HOWARD Camarillo