Cases bottleneck in Supreme Court

More than 400 of the 600 capital appeals in state stuck in high court because of overworked justices, existing backlog.

By FRED LUDWIG
Californian staff writer
e-mail: fludwig@bakersfield.com

Ronald Lee Sanders was sentenced to die in 1982 for beating a woman to death in Bakersfield during a drug robbery gone bad.

About a month later, Sanders got an appellate attorney and motions were filed with the Supreme Court in about two years.

And there the case sat -- for five years before getting its first hearing.

"I think their workload is beyond their capacity," said Sanders attorney Nina Rivkind of Supreme Court justices.

Death sentence appeals must be heard first in the state Supreme Court, where cases can grind to a halt as justices sometimes struggle to get through a host of complex issues on each case, attorneys said.

The logjam is such that most California Death Row appeals -- more than 400 of a total 600 cases -- are still pending in the state Supreme Court, said Robert Reichman, a staff attorney with the court.

And justices are not keeping pace with new appeals.

The court has received about 30 to 40 new death penalty cases each year for the past decade. It typically rules on an average of 12 a year.

Appeals generally take up to eight years to clear the Supreme Court step, Reichman said.

Many cases have taken longer, especially ones that entered the system before recent steps to speed up the process.

Sometimes, delays are beyond justices' control.

The Supreme Court cannot do anything with a case until the county-level trial court certifies the case file is complete, a task that has taken up to five years on some cases, Reichman said.

Whittling away at the backlog

Legislation passed in 1996 imposed deadlines that moves the certification along more quickly, Reichman said.

This year's state budget also gave the Supreme Court four new staff attorney positions to do capital research. It is hoped the new attorneys will speed processing by the court when the positions are filled next year, said California Supreme Court Chief Justice Ronald George.

A large chunk of the backlog may be a political leftover from the so-called "Rose Bird court."

Former Chief Justice Bird, considered notoriously liberal on the death penalty, oversaw a court that reversed more than 90 percent of death sentences that came before it in the 1980s. California residents in 1986 voted Bird out of office, ending the mass reversals.

But the reversals and disruption from the ouster added to the backlog, George said.

As for cases like Sanders', where it appears the file merely sat untouched for years, George had no explanation.

He agreed the five-year wait was extreme, adding justices usually act on appeals within a year of all paperwork being filed.

Ultimately, the California Supreme Court upheld the Sanders sentence, setting the stage for the appeal to move into the federal court system.

Deputy District Attorney Stephen Tauzer, who prosecuted the Sanders case, recalled trying to find out why the case was stagnating for so long. But he had no luck.

One of the victims who survived Sanders' attack, Dale Boender, is glad the case didn't move too quickly. Otherwise, Boender said, it might have landed on the Bird court and been overturned.

Now, though, he wants the case to move forward.

"It's high time we deal with this situation," Boender said. "I just look forward to the day we see him go."

Boender is still dealing with the physical and emotional scars he suffered the day in 1981 when he opened his door and saw Sanders and another man there with a gun.

Earlier that week, Sanders had reportedly lured Boender to a house in Oildale to rob him of cocaine. But Boender put up a fight and got away.

Three days later, Sanders and his accomplice showed up at Boender's apartment.

They tied up Boender and his fiancee, Janice Allen, and savagely beat them.

Allen died after the attack and Boender spent several days in a coma after receiving 148 stitches in his skull.

"I'm still not sure why I'm still here -- why I'm alive and she's dead," said Boender, now 47.

Supremely overwhelmed

Death penalty cases arrive on top of a growing Supreme Court workload in general. Cases of all types filed with the court reached a record 9,071 in the 1999-2000 year, court figures show.

"Obviously, the workload must be too great to handle everything in an expeditious manner," Tauzer said.

Review of death sentences is a common duty of state supreme courts around the country. But California's large population translates into an especially large capital workload for the seven justices.

In other types of cases, the court gets help from lower state appellate courts around California, which hear the cases first and frame the issues before they go on to Supreme Court justices.

Death sentences skip that step and go straight to the state's highest court. Some attorneys have suggested that using the lower appellate courts to frame issues on death penalty cases could help move them through the Supreme Court more quickly.

That would take a change in the state constitution.

George said he is willing to consider backing such an amendment, though he has concerns about the idea.

Different lower level appellate courts sometimes would decide similar questions in different ways, discrepancies the Supreme Court would have to sort out, George said.

And given the severity of the penalty, Supreme Court justices may still spend a lot of time on the cases anyway, he said.

Or, the justices could split up and decide capital cases in panels of three, the way lower state appellate courts hear their cases, Tauzer suggested.

Several defense attorneys said the problem isn't with the justices, but with trial prosecutors.

Officials are trigger-happy in seeking executions, sending the system more death appeals than it can handle, some defense attorneys said.

"The solution is to have it used for only the worst of the worst (criminals)," said San Francisco appellate attorney Cliff Gardner. "It's been abused here in California."

Not so, said David LaBahn, the California District Attorneys Association Deputy Executive Director. Capital punishment already is used sparingly, for just a tiny percentage of all murders. Cutting back more would be wrong, LaBahn said.

"That's not justice," LaBahn said. "From our side, how do you explain that to families (of victims)?"