CALIFORNIA ELECTIONS / GOVERNOR : Deukmejian Backs Wilson on Crime Bill

Sen. Pete Wilson and the man he hopes to succeed as governor, George Deukmejian, disagree on abortion rights, offshore oil drilling and the regulation of dangerous pesticides. But the state’s two most prominent Republicans showed Monday that they can always find common ground in that old GOP standby: crime.

At a Capitol news conference with several crime victims and family members of victims present, Deukmejian endorsed Proposition 115--the so-called “speedy trial” initiative--which Wilson has sponsored and made a chief component of his campaign for governor.

And Wilson pooh-poohed as a “cynical ploy” Atty. Gen. John K. Van de Kamp’s warning that a provision in the law-and-order ballot measure could threaten the abortion rights of California women if the U.S. Supreme Court overturns the Roe vs. Wade decision that legalized abortion in 1973.

He said Proposition 115 will improve the state’s court system. “For better than a quarter-century the state Legislature . . . has refused to prosecutors, peace officers and the citizens of this state the protections they are entitled to have,” Wilson said. “There is a fundamental right of all Californians not to be victims.”

Deukmejian said the initiative campaign gives new meaning to the old maxim that “justice delayed is justice denied.”

“It’s the victims and their families who are denied justice as a result of these long delays,” said Deukmejian, who has built his 28-year political career around an anti-crime theme.

Among other things, Proposition 115 would eliminate pretrial hearings after grand jury indictments, give to judges rather than lawyers the right to question jurors before a trial and consolidate trials of multiple defendants accused of committing the same crime.

The measure would also conform the right of privacy in California law to that in federal law, where the right to privacy is not spelled out in the Constitution but instead is subject to the interpretation of the U.S. Supreme Court. Van de Kamp and several abortion-rights groups argue that this provision of Proposition 115 could give new life to an old law on the California books that makes certain abortions a crime. That law has been considered unenforceable since California voters placed a right to privacy in the state Constitution in 1972.

Wilson rejected Van de Kamp’s use of the abortion-rights argument as an underhanded attempt to defeat the initiative. “His tortured legal theory is a cynical ploy,” Wilson said. “The ballot language makes it clear that this is in no way a threat to the existing . . . right of privacy which the people of California voted into the Constitution.”

Van de Kamp, who is seeking the Democratic nomination for governor against former San Francisco Mayor Dianne Feinstein, is circulating his own court-reform bill to get the necessary signatures to put it on the November ballot. It is identical to the Wilson initiative, except that it has language saying abortion rights would not be affected. Feinstein has endorsed the Wilson initiative.