Curbs Upheld on Multiple Killers’ Rights : Ruling: U.S. high court backs California limits on how often such murderers can appeal for early parole. A Los Angeles man had claimed the law retroactively increased his term.

The U.S. Supreme Court upheld a California law Tuesday that limits the right of multiple murderers to appeal for early parole.

The justices, by a 7-2 vote, rejected the claim of two-time killer Jose Ramon Morales of Los Angeles that a 1981 change in California’s parole law had in effect increased his sentence retroactively.

The court majority said murderers such as Morales and Charles Manson are unlikely to be granted early release regardless of how often they appear before the California parole panel, the Board of Prison Terms.

Therefore, the court said, the Legislature’s decision to permit the parole board to review the cases of a handful of multiple killers once every three years rather than annually does not impose an additional burden on such inmates. The law has since been changed to reduce the frequency of parole hearings to every five years for multiple killers.

Justice Clarence Thomas, writing for the majority, dismissed Morales’ charge that the real effect of the law was to increase his sentence beyond what was handed down upon his conviction in 1980. The California amendment “simply allows the board to avoid the futility of going through the motions of re-announcing its denial of parole” every year, Thomas wrote.

The Legislature enacted the 1981 amendment as a symbolic measure to get tough on crime and as a means of easing the administrative workload of the state parole board. Two dozen states have taken similar actions to tighten parole eligibility.

Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist and Justices Anthony M. Kennedy, Sandra Day O’Connor, Antonin Scalia, Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen G. Breyer joined Thomas in voting to uphold the California law.

Justices John Paul Stevens and David H. Souter, in a testy and at times sarcastic dissent, said the California law clearly violates the Constitution’s ban on ex post facto statutes and almost certainly will retroactively impose longer sentences on at least some inmates, something that the high court has expressly forbidden.

“The danger of legislative overreaching against which the ex post facto clause protects is particularly acute when the target of the legislation is a narrow group as unpopular (to put it mildly) as multiple murderers,” Stevens wrote. “There is obviously little legislative hay to be made in cultivating the multiple murderer vote.”

In 1971, Morales was convicted of beating his girlfriend to death and cutting off her thumb. Nine years later, he was paroled. A 75-year-old widow who had married Morales when he was behind bars began living with him July 4, 1980. Three days later, her hand was found on the Hollywood Freeway and her car, credit cards and jewelry were in Morales’ possession. The rest of her body was never found.

Morales pleaded no contest to murder charges and was sentenced to 15 years to life for the second killing.

Morales challenged the law as an unconstitutional after the fact imposition of a longer sentence in 1989, after his first parole hearing, when board members told him that they would not be seeing him for another three years under the 1981 statute.

Last year, the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals agreed with him.

Lawyers for the state of California, joined by 24 other states, appealed that decision to the Supreme Court. They said the appeals court ruling, if upheld, would restrict a series of laws intended to limit parole for dangerous criminals. A solid majority of the high court agreed Tuesday.

California Gov. Pete Wilson applauded the ruling as a victory for the families of the victims of “ruthless killers,” who no longer will be subjected to the “pain and anguish that comes with reliving these crimes at annual parole hearings.”

He also said the decision would relieve taxpayers of the cost of yearly parole hearings whose outcome is foreordained.

In another case originating in California, the Supreme Court ruled Tuesday that people who, under protest, pay federal taxes owed by someone else may sue for refunds.

Federal law “clearly allows one from whom taxes are erroneously or illegally collected to sue for a refund of those taxes,” Ginsburg wrote for the court’s 6-3 majority in the case. Otherwise, she said, such people would be left without legal recourse.