Name of Disgraced Legislator Will Stay on Laws He Authored

The Senate Rules Committee on Monday put the brakes on a bill to purge the name of former Sen. Alan Robbins, an ex-felon, from every state law “tombstoned” in his honor.

“Let the dead be buried,” Sen. Teresa Hughes (D-Inglewood) scolded the bill’s author, Assemblyman Lou Papan (D-Millbrae), defending the 50-year-old practice of legislators naming statutes after themselves.

The committee’s cold shoulder clearly surprised Papan, a man accustomed to getting his way during 17 years in the Legislature.

Faced with the likelihood of defeat, Papan agreed to return later with amendments to his bill that would outlaw legislative tombstones in the future.

Robbins, 57, a Van Nuys Democrat who represented the San Fernando Valley for nearly 20 years, pleaded guilty in 1991 to federal racketeering and tax evasion charges for his part in a wide-ranging legislative corruption scandal. He served 20 months in prison.

In a practice that has been increasing under term limits, lawmakers memorialize themselves by writing their names into statute titles, a device they think will help them at election time. But few citizens identify laws by their tombstones. Papan charged that Robbins brought “shame and discredit” to the Legislature. So, last month, he offered a bill that would erase Robbins’ name from 11 state laws that bear it.

Robbins learned of the bill and recently launched a lobbying campaign by telephone against it. In an interview, he said that he had been punished for his crimes and that he wasn’t the only lawmaker to bring discredit on the Legislature.

But the bill, which Papan had been so confident would easily pass that he didn’t lobby members for their support, hit unexpected opposition from committee members.

“I don’t know that you go and dig up corpses and try to revive the punishment that he endured,” Hughes told Papan, emphasizing that she had not talked to Robbins since he resigned from the Senate nearly 10 years ago.

Hughes said to “obliterate” his name from such enactments as the Robbins Rape Evidence Law or the Robbins-Rosenthal Fair Debt Collection Practice Act would be “disrespectful” to all those legislators who voted for them.

“You and I may have been people who voted for these measures,” Hughes told Papan.

But Papan, who equated Robbins with the early American traitor Benedict Arnold, assured Hughes that merely removing Robbins’ name from the official titles of laws would not change the statutes.

“What we are saying is this man has discredited us as a Legislature and his name should not be on a [law],” Papan said.

But another member, Sen. William “Pete” Knight (R-Palmdale), asserted that Robbins’ tenure in Sacramento was “part of history. I don’t think we ought to be about changing history.”