CALIFORNIA ELECTIONS / PROPOSITION 115 : Debaters Get Down to Cases on Court Overhaul

At a debate about a ballot initiative that would overhaul the state’s court system, the host, Superior Court Judge David G. Sills, told the audience he hoped the discussion would be “academic.” With such an emotional topic, Sills should have known better.

Deputy Public Defender Jennifer Keller said something that Municipal Judge Anthony J. Rackauckas called “an insult to all judges in the county.” Then Superior Court Judge Luis A. Cardenas said something that Keller called “an insult to all defense attorneys in the county.”

Keller not only declared the measure, Proposition 115, a disaster for California, but called it “poorly drafted.” Rackauckas, one of its co-authors who sat inches from her elbow, kept a poker face. But Deputy Dist. Atty. James P. Cloninger, the other co-author, could not conceal his slightly gritted teeth.

But then Cloninger might have still been fighting back his reaction to defense attorney Jack M. Earley’s veiled suggestion that Proposition 115 carried racist overtones.

But between heated moments, participants in the Thursday night debate gave the audience of news reporters, attorneys and judges at the Orange County Bar Assn. headquarters a detailed discussion about the effects of Proposition 115.

Authors of the measure intend to streamline the state courts to make them operate more like the federal system. They believe the proposition’s provisions will dramatically reduce the amount of time between arrest and trial.

Then, once a case goes to trial, they believe, time will be saved by having the judge take over the questioning of prospective jurors--the way it’s done in federal court.

But Earley and Keller, fierce opponents of the measure, suggested that the trade-off is the defendant’s right to a fair trial.

“We (in the state courts) have a different society; our clients come from a diverse ethnic background,” Earley said. “We need to deal with racial issues in jury selection.”

Co-author Cloninger said the measure was in line with what the framers of the state Constitution intended nearly a century and a half ago. But Earley retorted, “The framers of the Constitution were all Caucasians.”

One major provision of Proposition 115 would allow police officers to give hearsay testimony at preliminary hearings--namely, telling the court what other people have told them about the crime. Preliminary hearings are used to determine whether there is enough evidence to try someone in Superior Court.

Allowing hearsay not only spares the victim having to testify twice--at the preliminary hearing and then at trial--it would cut down on the length of the preliminary hearing, proponents of the initiative say.

But Keller was concerned that hearsay testimony will make a mockery of the purpose of a preliminary hearing by allowing as evidence potentially inaccurate secondhand and thirdhand information.

“You’ll get Officer Jones testifying that Officer Smith told him that he heard from Officer Rodriguez that Barbara, the victim, said the defendant is the guy who robbed her,” Keller said.

Not at all, Cloninger said. “What you have now is the victim taking time off from work to come in and testify, ‘I went shopping at K mart and when I came out, my car was gone,’ ” he said.