The California Academy of Appellate Lawyers has issued a statement opposing Proposition 66, the November ballot measure designed to speed up California’s death penalty process. (A competing initiative — Proposition 62 — would eliminate the death penalty in the state altogether.) [Disclosures: I’m an Academy member and past president; other Horvitz & Levy attorneys are also members; the current president is “of counsel” to the firm.]
Stating that it “neither supports nor opposes the death penalty or reasonable measures to clear the backlog of death penalty appeals,” the Academy calls the initiative an “ill-considered proposition” that “would impose crushing burdens on California’s Supreme Court and intermediate appellate courts, disrupting and delaying thousands of other cases for years to come.”
I have previously written that “[t]he disruption to the state’s judicial system if th[e] initiative became law cannot be overstated.”
