I'm not sure that this is true. To clarify a few points:Holbytla wrote:If the California death penalty is repealed, as I hope it is, it still seems to me that the judicial system will still be burdened with an overly bogged down and overly protective system that still precludes it from serving its own justice.
All prisoners who are not sentenced to death - including convicted murderers sentenced to 25-to-life or life without parole (LWOP) - receive one appeal. Based on U.S. Supreme Court caselaw, this is at taxpayer expense if they are indigent, in all states. In California, this means an appeal to the intermediate appellate court, the California Court of Appeal. There are six geographic districts of the Court of Appeal, spread throughout the state. Between them, they contain 105 justices who decide cases in panels of three. Clearly, the Court of Appeal is better numerically suited to handling homicide appeals than the seven justice California Supreme Court. The latter court's review in non-capital criminal cases is discretionary, which allows them greater control over their workload.
I described the state and federal habeas process. Condemned prisoners are entitled to counsel at taxpayer expense; counsel are entitled to an investigation budget to discover and present claims of constitutional error. Non-condemned prisoners do not enjoy these benefits, even if they are serving LWOP, and very few of them can afford private counsel. This means that they must file a habeas petition pro se (unrepresented) setting forth the extra-record constitutional violations that they believe occurred. Only if the state or federal court finds an adequately alleged constitutional violation will they appoint counsel. Three factors make this extremely unlikely. First, it is difficult for what the courts call an "unschooled petitioner" to allege a constitutional violation adequately; a vast number of these prisoners do not even have a 12th grade education. Second, being incarcerated, they do not have the wherewithal to investigate additional evidence that might have changed the outcome of their trial. In most cases, a petitioner will only be able to make this threshold showing with some assistance from a volunteer lawyer. Finally, prisoners are not always aware of statute of limitations issues which require them to file their claims timely, so many of them may miss deadlines that foreclose their claims.
Several prisoners on California's death row cite these concerns in publicly opposing Prop. 34: they do not want to lose their legal counsel. (They definitely do not speak for the entirety of death row, as some of their fellow condemned inmates - who are interested in no longer living under a death sentence - have noted. Edit See also here.)
If Proposition 34 passes, I predict that California will transfer from a system that is ineffective but somewhat protective of constitutional rights to a system that is more clearly underprotective of constitutional rights. I hesitate to say that the current state system IS protective of constitutional rights, because - as I explained earlier - the state system routinely denies constitutional claims, without explanation, that the federal system later sustains despite a more rigorous standard of review, with detailed explanation. But I think the current state system is trying, albeit ineffectively, to safeguard the rights of condemned prisoners. A post-Prop. 34 system is likely to err on the side of finality and efficiency (one record-based appeal and you're done) and against the vindication of constitutional rights that require postconviction/habeas process to vindicate (e.g., the prosecution's suppression of exculpatory evidence, known as a Brady claim). I think it is possible to strike an intermediate ground. How to do so may be the subject of post-initiative debate, if 34 passes, after the dust from this major reform settles.
