Legal Attack on Prop. 115 Stepped Up

The legal assault on Proposition 115 intensified Friday as opponents filed a second lawsuit seeking to invalidate the broad-ranging reforms in the criminal justice system approved by the voters June 5.

A group of prominent attorneys asked the state Court of Appeal here to intervene immediately to halt further enforcement of the measure.

The measure, approved by a 57% majority of the electorate, restricts the state constitutional rights of criminal defendants to those required by the federal Constitution and mandates a wide array of changes in the law to speed the criminal process.

Like an earlier suit now before an appeals court in Los Angeles, the legal action filed Friday contends that the sweeping terms of the proposition violate state constitutional requirements limiting ballot measures to a “single subject.”

The measure is so extensive that it also amounts to a “revision” of the state Constitution--rather than an “amendment”--and thus may not be enacted by initiative, the suit says.

Going a step further, the lawyers opposing the measure say it is so drastic in impact that it violates the U.S. Constitution by improperly taking away legal protections Californians have held for nearly a century under their own Constitution.

“Certainly, no state ever before has tried to remove so many constitutional rights at one fell swoop,” David B. Goodwin, a San Francisco lawyer representing foes of the initiative, said Friday.

The initiative places new limits on at least a dozen state constitutional rights, including the guarantee of privacy, the suit noted. Thus, for example, previous court rulings protecting the conversations of jail inmates and visitors, the rights of unrelated adults to live together and the right of women to obtain abortions all could be jeopardized, the suit says.

The suit, brought as a taxpayers’ action, names Gov. George Deukmejian, state Atty. Gen. John K. Van de Kamp and other officials as defendants. It was brought by Robert D. Raven of San Francisco, former president of the American Bar Assn.; Gerald F. Uelmen, dean of the Santa Clara University law school, and James F. Hewitt, former federal public defender in San Francisco.

The action asks the appeals court to issue an order barring the authorities from further enforcing the initiative and to declare the measure unconstitutional.

The suit calls the proposition “an attack on the very structure of government” and says that the “diverse political currents” that shape federal judicial rulings “will soon cause Californians to rue the day they so blithely abdicated their constitutional destiny to the federal courts.”

The opponents of the initiative argued that it was essential an order be issued immediately to halt the ongoing application of the measure to cases currently underway. If such an order is not issued soon, and the initiative is later declared unconstitutional, “the courts then will be confronted with the possibility of wholesale reversals of convictions and potential release of actually guilty defendants,” the lawsuit said.