Bird’s Opponents Admit That Film Misstates Facts

In the background of the film is a cemetery, in the foreground a woman talking about her murdered granddaughter and the decision of the California Supreme Court to overturn the murderer’s death sentence.

The woman says she is convinced that the current Supreme Court will take the same action if the man is sentenced to death a second time, and she says she is convinced that the court will overturn every other death penalty that comes before it--unless Chief Justice Rose Elizabeth Bird and Justices Cruz Reynoso and Joseph Grodin are voted out of office.

Presented at a $500-a-plate dinner Tuesday to help defeat Bird, Reynoso and Grodin, the 15-minute film concludes with a narrator’s statement that there have been 20,000 innocent murder victims in the state in the last 10 years and that none of their killers have received “just punishment,” thanks to the Supreme Court.

Emotional Message

The film is an example of the kind of wrenching personal testimony, made up of fact, emotionally charged opinion and campaign hyperbole, that has come to characterize the message being delivered to voters by opponents of Bird, Reynoso and Grodin.

In the past, such statements have drawn angry protests from the justices and occasional admissions of error from the people responsible for packaging the message.

Now, the producers of the film shown Tuesday concede that it too contains a misleading suggestion. The state Supreme Court is not responsible for thwarting justice in 20,000 murder cases, they admit.

Lee Stitzenberger, a political consultant working for Crime Victims for Court Reform, the campaign group that made the film, said Tuesday that the narrator’s comments tying the 20,000 murder cases to the court will be edited if Crime Victims decides to air the film as part of its planned television campaign against the justices.

But Stitzenberger said no changes will be made if the film is shown only at campaign functions, settings that could permit several thousand people to see the film before the November election.

During the year-long campaign against the three justices, there have been a number of erroneous statements about the court, often accusing one or more of the justices of joining in criminal or civil decisions in which they played no part.

On Monday, one of the groups opposing the justices, the Law and Order Campaign Committee headed by State Sen. H. L. Richardson, wrongly claimed in a campaign leaflet that the Bird court has made 15 previously condemned killers eligible for release, according to the Associated Press.

The AP story said that while the sentences of the 15 had been reduced from death to life with the possibility of parole, the action was taken in 1976 before Bird, Grodin or Reynoso were appointed to the court.

A spokeswoman for the Law and Order Committee said Tuesday afternoon that the committee still was “trying to decide if it had published erroneous information.” If it had, she said, Richardson said he would mail notices to the recipients of the leaflet and correct the mistake.

The film was shown to an audience of more than 300 at Tuesday’s dinner, including actor James Stewart and former U.S. Atty. Gen. William French Smith. It featured the parents and grandparents of three murder victims involved in death penalty cases that were reversed by the Supreme Court.

In one segment, one of the surviving relatives talks about the discovery of her 12-year-old daughter’s remains, a body so mutilated that the people who found it thought it was the skeleton of an animal and played catch with the bones.

In a brief statement to the audience, Smith said, “For too long the concerns of the accused and the concerns of victims have been tragically out of balance.”

The problem, he said, was particularly true in California where, he said, “There are those whose judicial arrogance has placed them above the law.”

The purpose of the dinner, held at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel and sponsored by Crime Victims for Court Reform, was to raise money for a planned series of television advertisements encouraging voters to reject Bird, Reynoso and Grodin.

Stitzenberger said he hoped that the dinner would raise at least $200,000 toward a projected television budget of $1 million. That is $1 million less than the group’s originally stated goal.