A pending high-profile writ petition challenges California’s death penalty system based on the claim the system is being administered in a racially discriminatory manner. The petition — Office of the State Public Defender v. Bonta — was filed 19 months ago, but the court has yet to decide whether there will be a hearing on the merits. After asking for additional briefing and conferencing on the matter six times, the court finally put the petition on hold “pending consideration and disposition of a related issue in Taking Offense v. State of California.”
The “related issue” is whether there is standing to bring the case.
Well, Taking Offense was decided today, but it doesn’t seem to resolve whether the OSPD writ petitioners have standing to stop the current death penalty system. The opinion holds that taxpayer standing under Code of Civil Procedure section 526a is not available “to sue wholly state officers or entities.”
Statutory taxpayer standing thus appears unavailable to the writ petitioners, but they have asserted section 526a as only the third of three bases for standing. They also claim “public interest” standing and “beneficial interest” standing under Code of Civil Procedure section 1086. The Taking Offense opinion expressly didn’t decide “whether plaintiff has standing pursuant to the common law public interest doctrine.” And it didn’t mention “beneficial interest” standing because section 1086 applies to writ petitions and the Taking Offense case is not a writ proceeding. The court also didn’t decide “whether the doctrine of common law taxpayer standing continues to exist,” a theory that the writ petitioners apparently have yet to rely on.
So, after 19 months and an opinion in the lead case for which the OSPD writ petition was holding, it still seems up in the air whether the court will conclude the petitioners even have standing let alone, if there is standing, whether the court will exercise its discretion to have a decision rendered — either by it or by a lower court — on the petition’s merits.
