RON BRIGGS v. EDMUND G. BROWN, JR., аs Governor, etc., et al.; CALIFORNIANS TO MEND, NOT END, THE DEATH PENALTY, etc., Intervener.
S238309
IN THE SUPREME COURT OF CALIFORNIA
August 24, 2017
SEE CONCURRING AND DISSENTING OPINIONS
Petitioner asserts four grounds for relief. He claims Proposition 66 (1) embraces more than one subject, as prohibited by the California Constitution;
Petitioner‘s constitutional challenges do not warrant relief. However, we hold that in order to avoid serious separation of powers problems, provisions of Proposition 66 that appear to impose strict deadlines on the resolution of judicial proceedings must be deemed directive rather than mandatory.
I. THE TERMS OF PROPOSITION 66
Proposition 66 includes a series of findings and declarations to the effect that California‘s death penalty system is inefficient, wasteful, and subject to protracted delay, denying murder victims and their families justice and due process. (Voter Information Guide, Gen. Elec. (Nov. 8, 2016) § 2, p. 212 (Voter Guide).) The measure enacts a series of statutory reforms, which may be grouped into three general categories: (1) provisions to expedite review in capital appeals and habeas corpus proceedings; (2) provisions governing the confinement of prisoners sentenced to death and the administration of the death penalty; and (3) provisions pertaining to California‘s Habeas Corpus Resource Center. Petitioner does not directly challenge each one of the measure‘s provisions. We summarize them all, however, as context for his claim that Proposition 66 unconstitutionally addresses more than one subject. (See part II.A, post.)2
A. Expedited Review
Proposition 66 amends
The initiative measure extensively revamps the procedures governing habeas corpus petitions in capital cases. Under current practice, habeas corpus proceedings are initiated in this court, which appoints counsel and provides for their compensation.4 Under the initiative measure, however, “[a] petition filed in any court other than the court which imposed the sentence should be promptly transferred to that court unless good cause is shown for the petition to be heard by another court. A petition filed in or transferred to the court which imposed the sentence shall be assigned to the original trial judge unless that judge is unavailable or there is other good cause to assign the case to a different judge.” (
The initial habeas corpus petition must be filed within a year of the appointment of counsel. (
Under existing law, there is no right to appeal from a superior court‘s denial of habeas corpus relief. The petitioner may obtain review by filing a new petition in a higher court. (In re Reed (1983) 33 Cal.3d 914, 918, fn. 2.) The People have a statutory right to appeal a grant of relief in a capital case directly to this court, under
B. Conditions of Confinement and Administration of the Death Penalty
Proposition 66 requires that prisoners sentenced to death perform work in prison and pay 70 percent of their wages and other trust account funds toward restitution. (
The measure amends
The Habeas Corpus Resource Center provides counsel, investigative staff, and experts for prisoners in capital habeas corpus proceedings. Currently the center is governed by a five-mеmber board of directors chosen by the Appellate Projects.7 The board appoints an executive director, who is confirmed by the California Senate. ( We consider only the objections raised by the amended and renewed petition before us. “We have no occasion at this time to consider other possible attacks,” and “except as necessary to resolve the basic questions before us, we do not consider in this case possible interpretive or analytical problems” that might arise from the measure in the future. (Raven v. Deukmejian, supra, 52 Cal.3d at pp. 340-341.) We review here a facial challenge to the constitutionality of Proposition 66, and express no view on claims that may be presented by individual prisoners based on their own circumstances. We are guided by policies this court has consistently followed in cases challenging the validity of initiative measures. “‘[T]he Constitution‘s initiative and referendum provisions should be liberally construed to maintain maximum power in the people.‘” (Independent Energy Producers Assn. v. McPherson (2006) 38 Cal.4th 1020, 1032, quoting Legislature v. Deukmejian (1983) 34 Cal.3d 658, 675; see also Carlson v. Cory (1983) 139 Cal.App.3d 724, 728.) Under “An initiative measure embracing more than one subject may not be submitted to the electors or have any effect.” ( “[T]he single-subject provision does not require that each of the provisions of a measure effectively interlock in a functional relationship. [Citation.] It is enough that the various provisions are reasonably related to a common theme or purpose.” (Legislature v. Eu, supra, 54 Cal.3d at p. 513.) Accordingly, we have upheld initiative measures “which fairly disclose a reasonablе and common sense relationship among their various components in furtherance of a common purpose.’ [Citation.]” ( A review of other comprehensive criminal justice reforms enacted by initiative, and upheld against single-subject challenges, demonstrates that Proposition 66 passes the “reasonably germane” test. The “Victims’ Bill of Rights” at issue in Brosnahan, supra, 32 Cal.3d 236, included provisions providing for (1) restitution to crime victims; (2) an inalienable right to safe public schools; (3) a sweeping restriction on judicially created rules of evidentiary exclusion; (4) new limitations on grants of bail; (5) the use of prior felony convictions for impeachment purposes; (6) abolishment of the diminished capacity defense and reinstatement of the M‘Naghten test for legal insanity;8 (7) sentence enhancements for habitual criminals; (8) victim participation in sentencing proceedings; (9) plea bargain restrictions; and (10) limitations on commitments to the California Youth Authority (now the Division of Juvenile Justice). (Brosnahan, at pp. 242-245.) The Brosnahan court found it “readily apparent” that these provisions shared “a common concern, ‘general object’ or ‘general subject,’ promoting the rights of actual or potential crime victims. . . . [T]he 10 sections were designed to strengthen procedural and substantive safeguards for victims in our criminal justice system. These changes were aimed at achieving more severe punishment for, and more effective deterrence of, criminal acts, protecting the public from the premature release into society of criminal offenders, providing safety from crime to a particularly vulnerable group of victims, namely school pupils and staff, and assuring restitution for the victims of criminal acts.” (Brosnahan, supra, 32 Cal.3d at p. 247.) In Raven v. Deukmejian, supra, 52 Cal.3d 336 (Raven), the court examined the “Crime Victims Justice Reform Act,” which provided for (1) postindictment preliminary hearings; (2) restricting certain state constitutional criminal rights to afford no greater protection than is provided by the federal Constitution; (3) the people‘s right to due process and a speedy public trial; (4) greater flexibility with regard to joinder and less with regard Manduley v. Superior Court (2002) 27 Cal.4th 537 (Manduley) involved the “Gang Violence and Juvenile Crime Prevention Act of 1998.” That initiative measure included 13 provisions relating to criminal gang activity, four provisions amending the Three Strikes law, and 17 provisions amending Welfare and Institutions Code sections pertaining to the juvenile justice system. The Manduley court observed that the “general object of the initiative is to address the problem of violent crime committed by juveniles and gangs - not simply to reduce crime generally.” (Id. at pp. 575-576.) It noted that broader criminal justice reforms were upheld against single-subject challenges in Raven and Brosnahan. (Id. at p. 576.) Although the Three Strikes reforms in Manduley “at first blush, might not bear an obvious relationship to juvenile or gang offenders,” the court decided “upon closer scrutiny we cannot properly conclude that they are not reasonably related to the goal of the initiative.” (Manduley, supra, 27 Cal.4th at p. 577.) “Even if some of the crimes added to the list of violent and serious felonies are more likely to be committed by an adult who is not a gang member, the offenses nonetheless constitute crimes that commonly are committed by members of street gangs and/or juvenile offenders and thus bear a reasonable аnd commonsense relationship to the purpose of the initiative.” (Id. at p. 578.) “Thus, despite the collateral effects of these provisions upon adults who are not gang members, and despite the circumstance that [one provision] has the incidental effect of adding strikes that the Legislature previously had [not] included in the list of violent and serious felonies, the provisions remain relevant to the common purpose of” the measure. (Id. at pp. 578-579.) Restitution is a significant aspect of a criminal sentence and a benefit to victims. (See Petitioner‘s jurisdictional challenges to Proposition 66‘s habeas corpus reforms are based on Petitioner contends Proposition 66 violates In challenging With respect to We have recognized that “[b]y removing ‘unnecessary’ provisions from article VI, and allowing those matters to be regulated by statute, the commission‘s revisions of article VI effectively broadened the scope of the Legislature‘s control over judicial procedures.” (Powers v. City of Richmond (1995) 10 Cal.4th 85, 94 (plur. opn. of Kennard, J.); see Leone v. Medical Board (2000) 22 Cal.4th 660, 667.) Thus, the provisions of Contrary to petitioner‘s argument, Like Petitioner further contends that Unlike Here we read Section 1509.1, subdivision (a) states: “Either party may appeal the decision of a superior court on an initial petition under Section 1509 to the court of appeal. . . . A successive petition shall not be used as a means of reviewing a denial of habeas relief.”14 These provisions are a significant departure from the existing procedure that would govern a capital habeas corpus petition filed in superior court. A petitioner currently has no right to appeal from a superior court denial of habeas corpus relief. Instead, review is obtained by filing a new habeas corpus petition in a higher court. (Clark, supra, 5 Cal.4th at p. 767, fn. 7; Reed, supra, 33 Cal.3d at p. 918, fn. 2.) The People, on the other hand, have a statutory right to appeal from a superior court‘s grant of relief on habeas corpus. Petitioner contends the provision of We examined the extent of our exclusive jurisdiction in Thompson v. Department of Corrections (2001) 25 Cal.4th 117 (Thompson). Thompson filed suit to compel prison authorities to allow his spiritual adviser to remain with him until shortly before his execution. The superior court issued an injunction. The court of appeal dismissed the authorities’ appeal on the ground that the matter was within this court‘s exclusive jurisdiction under “As a result, this court‘s exclusive death penalty jurisdiction, as currently described in section 11 of article VI, is the same as it was in section 4 of former article VI, applying only to criminal cases in which a judgment of death has been rendered.” (Thompson, supra, 25 Cal.4th at p. 124.) Because Thompson was “not a criminal case,” but rather a civil suit for declaratory and injunctive relief, we concluded “the appeal [did] not fall within this court‘s exclusive jurisdiction.” (Ibid.) Thompson‘s description of our exclusive jurisdiction as limited to the criminal case in which judgment was rendered is consistent with the understanding expressed by the Judicial Council in its report on the 1966 constitutional revision that framed article VI. “Under Section 11, the direct appellate jurisdiction of the Supreme Court In re Scott (2003) 29 Cal.4th 783 (Scott), was a capital habeas corpus case in which we issued an order to show cause and appointed a referee to take evidence on claims of ineffective assistance of counsel. (Id. at pp. 791-792.) At the evidentiary hearing, Scott invoked his constitutional and statutory rights not to be called as a witness in a criminal case. ( In re Barnett (2003) 31 Cal.4th 466 (Barnett) considered whether prisoners sentenced to death, and represented by counsel, are entitled to submit pro se claims related to their habeas corpus petitions. We noted that no such right pertains on appeal when the defendant has an attorney, and emphasized that “an inmate‘s rights regarding legal representation in a state habeas corpus proceeding are even more limited than on an appeal.” (Id. at p. 474) Habeas corpus relief is “‘further removed from the criminal trial than is [appellate] review. It is not part of the criminal proceeding itself, and it is in fact considered to be civil in nature.‘” (Ibid., fn. omitted, quoting Pennsylvania v. Finley (1987) 481 U.S. 551, 556-557, and citing Scott, supra, 29 Cal.4th at p. 815.) In People v. Superior Court (Pearson) (2010) 48 Cal.4th 564, we construed The holding in Pearson turned on the independent nature of habeas corpus proceedings. “Although section 1054.9‘s discovery may occur before the actual habeas corpus petition is filed, it is part of the prosecution of the habeas corpus matter, not part of the underlying criminal case. [¶] Proposition 115‘s discovery provisions all deal with the underlying trial. For this reason, we have held that they do not apply to habeas corpus matters (although they may provide guidance in crafting discovery orders on habeas corpus). ([Scott, supra,] 29 Cal.4th 783, 813-814.)” (Pearson, supra, 48 Cal.4th at p. 572.)17 Scott, Barnett, and Pearson make it clear that regardless of whether habeas corpus proceedings are deemed civil or criminal in nature (compare Scott, supra, 29 Cal.4th at p. 815, fn. 6, with Barnett, supra, 31 Cal.4th at p. 474), they are separate actions. Accordingly, they are not cases “in which a judgment of death has been rendered,” and do not come within our exclusive jurisdiction under For these reasons, The provision of Petitioner further argues that It is true that the former method of seeking review by filing a new petition was based on the appellate courts’ original habeas corpus jurisdiction. (Reed, supra, 33 Cal.3d at p. 918, fn. 2; In re Michael E. (1975) 15 Cal.3d 183, 193, fn. 15.) However, it does not follow that the discontinuation of that practice violates Thus, Petitioner argues that Proposition 66‘s restrictions on successive habeas corpus petitions by prisoners sentenced to death violate the equal protection clauses of the state and federal Constitutions. “‘Broadly stated, equal protection of the laws means “that no person or class of persons shall be denied the same protection of the laws [that] is enjoyed by other persons or other classes in like circumstances in their lives, liberty and property and in their pursuit of happiness.” [Citation.]’ [Citation.] It does not mean, however, that ‘“things . . . different in fact or opinion [must] be treated in law as though they were the same.” [Citation.]’ [Citation.] ‘[N]either the Petitioner argues that prisoners sentenced to death are situated similarly to noncapital prisoners because both groups have the same interest in freedom from an illegal or unjust conviction or sentence. Such a characterization of the interest at stake is overly broad. The question is whether capital and noncapital prisoners are similarly situated for purposes of With respect to successive petitions, Reno set out the significant differences between capital and noncapital prisoners. We observed that the justification for a comprehensive first habeas сorpus petition in a capital case “all but disappears for second and subsequent petitions in this court. Absent the unusual circumstance of some critical evidence that is truly ‘newly discovered’ under our law, or a change in the law, such successive petitions rarely raise an issue even remotely plausible, let alone state a prima facie case for actual relief. In the 18 years since [] Clark, supra, 5 Cal.4th 750, experience has taught that in capital cases, petitioners frequently file second, third, and even fourth habeas corpus petitions raising nothing but procedurally barred claims.” (Reno, supra, 55 Cal.4th at pp. 457-458, fns. omitted.) Such abusive successive writ practices are not nearly so common in noncapital cases. Reno noted that the prevalence of meritless successive writ petitions “has threatened to undermine the efficacy of the system for adjudicating petitions for collateral relief in cases involving the death penalty.” (Reno, supra, 55 Cal.4th at p. 442.) Accordingly, we “establish[ed] some new ground rules for [successive] petitions in capital cases that will speed this court‘s consideration of them without unfairly limiting petitioners from raising (and exhausting) justifiably new claims.” (Id. at p. 443.) We deemed these new rules necessary because abusive practices were a problem specific to capital cases. “The abusive nature of the instant petition is by no means an isolated phenomenon. In those capital cases in which we have affirmed the judgment on appeal and then denied a typically lengthy first habeas corpus petition, we often - years later - receive [a successive] petition running several hundred pages long. Evaluation of the [successive] petition requires several weeks if not months of dedicated work by members of the court. As here, quite often the petition is nothing more than a repetition or reframing of past claims and unsubstantiated assertions of ineffective assistance of counsel. Rarely if at all does the petitioner justify his or her untimely presentation of claims. “These practices, along with other factors, have created a significant threat to our capacity to timely and fairly adjudicate such matters. We are of course aware that ‘death row inmates have an incentive to delay assertion of habeas corpus claims that is not shared by other prisoners.’ ([] Clark, supra, 5 Cal.4th at p. 806 (conc. & dis. opn. of Kennard, J.); see Rhines v. Weber (2005) 544 U.S. 269, 277-278 [suggesting capital defendants ‘might deliberately engage in dilatory tactics to prolong their incarceration and avoid execution of the sentence of death‘].) Yet those capital defendants whose appeals are fully briefed, and those habeas corpus petitioners whose briefing also is complete who may desire resolution, must sit and wait while we attend to these time-consuming but generally meritless [successive] petitions. Some death row prisoners with meritorious legal claims may languish in prison for years waiting for this court‘s review while we evaluate petitions raising dozens or even hundreds of frivolous and untimely claims. We are not the only state court of last resort concerned that abusive [successive] petitions threaten the court‘s ability to function. (See Commonwealth of Pennsylvania v. Spotz (2011) 610 Pa. 17, 171 (conc. opn. of Castille, C. J.) [estimating that the time required to evaluate an abusive postconviction petition in capital cases renders the Pa. Supreme Ct. ‘unable to accept and review about five discretionary appeals‘].)” (Reno, supra, 55 Cal.4th at pp. 514-515, italics added.) The new rules announced in Reno established page limits for successive petitions in capital cases and permitted certain claims to be presented in abbreviated form. (Reno, supra, 55 Cal.4th at pp. 515-516.) We also required counsel to clearly identify those claims that were earlier raised and rejected and in what proceedings, those claims that could have been raised earlier, those that were truly new, and those presented pursuant to federal court order requiring the exhaustion of state claims. (Id. at p. 443.) We advised counsel that in the future, abusive writ practices could result in financial sanctions. (Id. at p. 514.) We adopted these extraordinary measures to address issues peculiar to the successive petition process in capital cases. Petitioner relies on Allen v. Butterworth (Fla. 2000) 756 So.2d 52, in which the Florida Supreme Court commented that a statute imposing deаdlines on capital postconviction procedures violated equal protection. (Id. at p. 54.) The comment was dictum. The Allen court conducted no equal protection analysis, and based its holding instead on separation of powers grounds. (Ibid.; see Abdool v. Bondi (Fla. 2014) 141 So.3d 529, 546.) In Abdool, the same court rejected an equal protection challenge to a different statute restricting the time for capital defendants to file postconviction motions. Holding that the statute Our holding on the equal protection claim raised by petitioner poses no bar to other constitutional challenges to Petitioner contends Proposition 66 violates the separation of powers doctrine by defeating or materially impairing the exercise of judicial functions in various ways. After a review of separation of powers principles, we discuss petitioner‘s attack on “The powers of state government are legislative, executive, and judicial. Persons charged with the exercise of one power may not exercise either of the others except as permitted by this Constitution.” ( “Of necessity the judicial department as well as the executive must in most matters yield to the power of statutory enactments. [Citations.] The power of the legislature to regulate criminal and civil proceedings and appeals is undisputed.” (Brydonjack, supra, 208 Cal. at pp. 442-443; accord, Mendocino, supra, 13 Cal.4th at p. 54.)23 The scope of this power is broad, but not unlimited. “[T]he legislature may put reasonable restrictions upon constitutional functions of the courts provided they do not defeat or materially impair the exercise of those functions. . . . ‘[T]he mere procedure by which jurisdiction is to be exercised may be prescribed by the Legislature, unless . . . such regulations should be found to substantially impair the constitutional powers of the courts, or practically defeat their exercise. [Citations.]‘” (Brydonjack, at p. 444; accord, Mendocino, at p. 54.) We have emphasized that “[t]he separation of powers limitation on the Legislature‘s power to regulate procedure is narrow. Chaos could ensue if courts were generally able to pick and choose which provisions of the Code of Civil Procedure to follow and which to disregard as infringing on their inherent powers. The same concern applies to the Evidence Code, which, after all, generally limits a court‘s ability to consider evidence. In most matters, the judicial branch must necessarily yield to the legislative power to enact statutes. [Citations.] Only if a legislative regulation truly defeats or materially impairs the courts’ core functions . . . may a court declare it invalid.” (Le Francois v. Goel (2005) 35 Cal.4th 1094, 1104 (Le Francois); see Legislature v. Deukmejian, supra, 34 Cal.3d at p. 674 [initiative measures are subject to the same constitutional Petitioner contends the restrictions imposed by As noted, we have long accorded priority to the legislative branch respecting measures “to regulate criminal and civil proceedings and appeals.” (Brydonjack, supra, 208 Cal. at pp. 442-443; see Le Francois, supra, 35 Cal.4th at p. 1104.) Accordingly, to violate the separation of powers an initiative measure must do more than merely curtail procedures developed by this court. In Mendocino, we pointed out that while the courts have inherent power to act in certain areas without specific constitutional or legislative authorization, that does not mean a statute “necessarily violates the separation of powers doctrine whenever it legislates with regard to such an inherent Thus, Petitioner argues that a variety of time limits and calls for expedited proceedings in Proposition 66 interfere with the courts’ inherent power to fairly and effectively address all the matters before them. We note that grants of priority to certain matters, and directives to conduct proceedings as speedily as possible, are a common feature of procedural statutes.24 These legislatively imposed priorities have never been held to impair the courts’ authority to control the disposition of the cases on their dockets. Accordingly, Petitioner also challenges the specific time limits provided in The subject is not a new one. We have long recognized that imposing fixed time limits on the performance of judicial functions raises serious separation of powers concerns. In Garrison v. Rourke, supra, 32 Cal.2d 430 (Garrison), we declared that “[a] time limitation for the court‘s action in a matter subject to its determination is not mandatory (regardless of the mandatory nature of the language), unless a consequence or penalty is provided for failure to do the act within the time commanded.” (Id. at pp. 435-436; see Kabran v. Sharp Memorial Hospital (2017) 2 Cal.5th 330, 343; People v. Allen (2007) 42 Cal.4th 91, 102.) At issue in Garrison was the effect of a statute requiring the trial court to rule on an election contest within 10 days.27 The court missed the deadline but subsequently issued a ruling. The Garrison court rejected the claim, invoking the separation of powers doctrine. “While the courts are subject to reasonable statutory regulation of procedure and other matters, they will maintain their constitutional powers in order effectively to function as a separate department of government. [Citations.] Consequently an intent to defeat the exercise of the court‘s jurisdiction will not be supplied by implication. To what extent the Legislature may constitutionally enact regulations affecting procedure which will defeat or interfere with the exercise of jurisdiction or of the judicial power [citations], is not necessary to determine in the absence, as here, of provisions clearly indicating that intent.” (Garrison, supra, 32 Cal.2d at p. 436.) Reasoning that the primary aim of the statute before it was not speed, but ensuring the fairness of an election, Garrison declined to give the term “shall” its normal mandatory interpretation, which would “lead to the result of defeating the aims and purposes of the statute and of raising serious constitutional questions.” (Id. at p. 437.) Garrison relied in part on In re Shafter-Wasco Irr. Dist. (1942) 55 Cal.App.2d 484 (Shafter-Wasco), which involved a time limit on the resolution of an appeal. An uncodified statute governing the dissolution of irrigation districts provided that an action contesting the validity of such a dissolution “ ‘shall be speedily tried and judgment rendered. Either party shall have the right to appeal at any time within thirty days after the entering of such judgment, and the appeal must be heard and determined within three months after the taking of such appeal.’ ” (Shafter-Wasco, at p. 486.) The respondents moved to dismiss the appeal after the three-month period expired. The court noted that “all the proceedings in this appeal have been taken within the times established for appeals in ordinary cases,” yet the time set for decision had elapsed before the respondents’ brief was due. (Ibid.) “The question here presented may be thus stated: May the Legislature divest this court of its constitutional jurisdiction over the case and its duty to decide it by limiting the time in which a decision must be rendered, to a period within which it is impracticable, if not impossible, to decide the issues?” (Id. at p. 487) “Of course it is within the power of the Legislature to impose reasonable rules and regulations governing the exercise of a constitutional power. It is equally true that those constitutional powers may not be so restricted by unreasonable rules as to virtually nullify them. If the statute in The court acknowledged that a statute declaring an apрeal “must be heard and determined within three months” would “usually [be] construed as mandatory.” (Shafter-Wasco, supra, 55 Cal.App.2d at p. 488.) However, relying on the rules favoring statutory construction to avoid absurd or unjust results, account for statutory context, and uphold a statute‘s constitutionality when reasonably possible, the court concluded that the time limit before it was “directory and was intended to give this appeal as early a hearing and decision as orderly procedure in this court will permit.” (Id. at p. 489.) Otherwise, the court would have held the statute “an unreasonable limitation on the constitutional powers of the appellate and supreme courts.” (Id. at p. 488.) In Garrison and Shafter-Wasco, the courts preserved jurisdiction and maintained the separation of powers by holding that time limits phrased in mandatory terms were merely directory.28 In People v. Engram (2010) 50 Cal.4th 1131 (Engram) we examined the separation of powers problems posed by a statute prescribing a mandatory calendar preference. A criminal prosecution had been dismissed under the The Engram court disagreed. “It is well established, in California and elsewhere, that a court has both the inherent authority and responsibility to fairly and efficiently administer all of the judicial proceedings that are pending before it, and that one important element of a court‘s inherent judicial authority in this regard is ‘the power . . . to control the disposition of the causes on its docket with economy of time and effort for itself, for counsel, and for litigants. How this can best be done calls for the exercise of judgment, which must weigh competing interests and maintain an even balance.’ (Landis v. North American Co. (1936) 299 U.S. 248, 254–255; see, e.g., Hays v. Superior Court (1940) 16 Cal.2d 260, 264 [‘There is nothing novel in the concept that a trial court has the power to exercise a reasonable control over all proceedings connected with the litigation before it. Such power necessarily exists as one of the inherent powers of the court and such power should be exercised by the courts in order to insure the orderly administration of justice.’]; Plachte v. Bancroft, Inc. (N.Y.App.Div. 1957) 161 N.Y.S.2d 892, 893 [‘It is ancient and undisputed law that courts have an inherent power over the control of their calendars, and the disposition of business before them, including the order in which disposition will be made of that business.’].) As this court observed in Brydonjack [, supra,] 208 Cal. [at p. 442]: ‘Our courts are set up by the Constitution without any special limitations; hence the courts have and should maintain vigorously all the inherent and implied In Engram we acknowledged the Legislature‘s power to enact rules of procedure, but quoted Brydonjack for the fundamental limitation noted above: “‘The sum total of this matter is that the legislature may put reasonable restrictions upon constitutional functions of the courts provided they do not defeat or materially impair the exercise of those functions.’” (Engram, supra, 50 Cal.4th at p. 1147, quoting Brydonjack, supra, 208 Cal. at p. 444.) We discussed two examples in which the courts refused to give mandatory effect to statutes requiring a continuance of trial. In Lorraine v. McComb (1934) 220 Cal. 753, 754 (Lorraine), a statute provided that “the court shall postpone a trial” upon the agreement of counsel. The requirement was held to be directory only, to avoid impinging on the courts’ inherent authority to control the order of their business. (Id. at pp. 756-757; see Engram, at pp. 1147-1148.) Similarly, in Thurmond v. Superior Court (1967) 66 Cal.2d 836 (Thurmond), a statute declared that a trial or hearing “shall be postponed” if an attorney were a member of the Legislature and the Legislature were in session. (Id. at p. 838, fn. 2.) The court deemed this provision directory, to protect the trial court‘s discretion to control the order of its business so as to safeguard the interests of all parties.30 (Id. at p. 839.) It noted the “serious constitutional questions” that would otherwise arise under the separation of powers doctrine. (Ibid.; see Engram, at pp. 1149-1150.) The Engram court emphasized that under the terms of Relying on Engram, Thurmond, and Lorraine, the Verio court held that “[u]nless sections 595 and 1054.1, subdivision (b) are interpreted as directory, they continue to infringe on the independence of the judiciary.” (Verio, supra, 3 Cal.App.5th at p. 1329.) The statutes did not include a qualification recognizing the court‘s obligation to conduct proceedings “in a manner that is consistent with the ends of justice,” as in Engram, supra, 50 Cal.4th at p. 1151. “To the contrary, with certain exceptions, sections 595 and 1054.1 explicitly describe the continuance or extension of time as ‘mandatory.’” (Verio, at p. 1330.) Nevertheless, Verio refused to give the statutes mandatory effect. “[A]s we noted above, the exceptions are directed entirely toward provisional relief and fail to account for our high court‘s conclusion that a mandatory lengthy stay may hamper a court‘s fundamental mandate even outside the context of provisional relief. We conclude, therefore, that sections 595 and 1054.1 are unconstitutional to the extent they purport to be mandatory, and should continue to be treated as directory, subject to a trial court‘s discretion as set forth in Thurmond.” (Ibid.) Thus, our case law establishes that while the Legislature has broad authority to regulate procedure, the constitutional separation of powers does not permit statutory restrictions that would materially impair fair adjudication or unduly restrict the courts’ ability to administer justice in an orderly fashion. Repeatedly, for over 80 years, California courts have held that statutes may not be given mandatory effect, despite mandatory phrasing, when strict enforcement would create constitutional problems. Petitioner disagrees. He contends the enforcement provisions of On balance, we conclude it is best to accept the Attorney General‘s and intervener‘s concession that the five-year limit is not mandatory. We do so for two reasons. First, regardless of how the ballot materials characterized the five-year review limit, Notably, the time limit for which In any event, it would be no solution to simply replace the letter “b” with the letter “d” in If there were any one court responsible for compliance with the five-year review limit of Furthermore, while writs of mandate may be issued to lower courts, achievement of the five-year goal depends in large part on a variety of discretionary determinations by superior courts and courts of appeal, most of which would not be controllable by writ of mandate. It is settled that “‘mandamus will not lie to control the discretion of a court or judicial officer or to compel its exercise in a particular manner, except in those rare instances when under the facts it can be legally exercised in but one way [citations].’” (City of Torrance v. Superior Court (1976) 16 Cal.3d 195, 201-202, italics omitted; see 8 Witkin, Cal. Procedure, supra, Extraordinary Writs, § 99 et seq., p. 993 et seq.) This limitation is fundamental, and implicit in the provisions of our state Constitution governing writ jurisdiction. (Modern Barber, supra, 31 Cal.2d at p. 731.) For all these reasons, As the concurring and dissenting opinion emphasizes, the ballot materials suggested the five-year limit would be mandatory. However, nowhere were the voters informed of the details of an enforcement mechanism. The materials mentioned the availability of a court order, but did not explain how such an order could effectively result in compliance. We recognize that the last sentence of It would require extensive rewriting to create an operative enforcement mechanism. Even if we undertook that task, any provision that would make the five-year limit mandatory would pose serious separation of powers problems. When we exercise our power of reformation, we do so in order to preserve a statute‘s constitutionality, not to threaten it. “[W]e have the authority to revise [a statute] in a manner that avoids constitutional problems . . . .” (People v. Sandoval (2007) 41 Cal.4th 825, 844, italics added.) “[N]umerous decisions of the United States Supreme Court and lower federal courts and sister states, and numerous decisions of this court, amply support the propriety of judicial reformation—including ‘rewriting’—of statutes to preserve constitutionality . . . .” (Kopp v. Fair Pol. Practices Com. (1995) 11 Cal.4th 607, 626, italics added.) It has never been our practice to rewrite a statute only to strike it down as unconstitutional. The concurring and dissenting opinion argues at length that the voters intended the five-year limit to be mandatory. We do not dispute that point. However, it remains the case that In the cases cited above, mandatory statutory terms were intended to expedite proceedings or control docket management, but the courts declined to infer a broader intent to infringe on inherent judicial authority. As the Verio court put it, “we are not persuaded the Legislature intended to intrude on the right of the courts ‘to control [their] order of business and to so conduct the same that the rights of all suitors before them may be safeguarded. This power has been recognized as judicial in its nature, and as being a necessary appendage to a court organized to enforce rights and redress wrongs.’” (Verio, supra, 3 Cal.App.5th at p. 1319, quoting Thurmond, supra, 66 Cal.2d at p. 839, and Lorraine, supra, 220 Cal. at p. 756.) Following nine decades of precedent, we too decline to infer that lawmakers intended strict adherence to a fixed deadline that would undermine the courts’ authority as a separate branch of government. It is far from certain that the voters contemplated such a result. Nothing in the Proposition 66 suggests that short shrift should be given to the decisionmaking process, or that capital posttrial review proceedings should dominate dockets to the point that other cases would be left to languish. In the absence of clearer indications that this was the voters’ intent, we will not presume they meant to hamper the courts in the conduct of their business. (See Engram, supra, 50 Cal.4th at pp. 1151-1152; Garrison, supra, 32 Cal.2d at p. 436.) Deciding cases and managing dockets are quintessentially core judicial functions. They are grounded in the Constitution and may not be materially impaired by statute. (Le Francois, supra, 35 Cal.4th at p. 1104; Mendocino, supra, 13 Cal.4th at p. 54; Brydonjack, supra, 208 Cal. at p. 444.) Accordingly, we conclude that the five-year review limit in In Engram we read the terms of Similar considerations apply to The limits in We note that Our conclusion that the time limits in Legislated time limits can establish as a matter of policy that the proceedings they govern should be given “as early a hearing and decision as orderly procedure . . . will permit.” (Shafter-Wasco, supra, 55 Cal.App.2d at p. 489.) They may serve as benchmarks to guide courts, if meeting the limits is reasonably possible. What is reasonably possible, however, will depend on a variety of factors, both structural and case-specific. It remains to be seen how effective the procedures enacted by Proposition 66 will be in expediting the capital posttrial review process. The time limits reflect the voters’ will, which we respect. However, they were presented to the voters by the proponents of Proposition 66 without the benefit of hearings Much depends on the funding made available by the Legislature. What cannot be permitted is the material impairment of judicial functions by any statute. The superior courts must be allowed to exercise their “ultimate control or discretion over the order in which the cases pending before [them] should be considered” (Engram, supra, 50 Cal.4th at p. 1151), and to give each case the time required for reasoned decision. The courts of appeal may not be thwarted in the exercise of their original jurisdiction to review superior court judgments in all the cases brought before them. ( The Judicial Council, in drafting the “rules and standards of administration” for carrying out Proposition 66‘s reforms ( Proposition 66 declares that “all sections of this act take effect immediately upon enactment.” (Prop. 66, § 19.) However, we stayed the implementation of the measure pending our resolution of this matter. The effective date is a question of some importance, particularly for the Judicial Council, which is tasked with developing rules and standards “[w]ithin 18 months of the effective date.” ( We discharge the order to show cause, and deny the amended and renewed petition for a writ of mandate and injunctive relief. CORRIGAN, A. C. J. WE CONCUR: WERDEGAR, J. LIU, J. KRUGER, J. HOCH, J.* * Associate Justice of the Court of Appeal, Third Appellate District, assigned by the Chief Justice pursuant to CONCURRING OPINION BY LIU, J. Proposition 66 amended I believe both positions are reasonable. Like Justice Cuellar, I find it stunning that Proposition 66‘s proponents and the Attorney General claim that the voters intended the five-year limit to be nonbinding or aspirational when that claim is plainly belied by the ballot materials and advocacy campaign for Proposition 66. (Conc. & dis. opn., post, at pp. 2-3, 11-15.) However, the electorate passed Proposition 66 against a backdrop of precedent construing similar mandates as nonmandatory when necessary to save their constitutionality (maj. opn., ante, at pp. 41-49), and we presume the electorate is “aware of existing laws and judicial construction thereof” (People v. Gonzales (2017) 2 Cal.5th 858, 869). Although I am unsure whether I would construe voter intent as flexibly as our decisions have, I acknowledge this is one way of enforcing the separation of powers and there is a lot of water over the dam in our case law. So, although no one really disagrees that “the voters intended the five-year limit to be mandatory” (maj. opn., ante, at p. 53), our precedent supports the court‘s approach of imputing to the voters a further intent not to unconstitutionally impair the judicial function (id. at p. 55). All members of the court agree I write separately to highlight that whether the five-year limit is directive or unconstitutional, it does not and could not bind those charged with implementing Proposition 66. It is clear that a majority of the 2016 electorate voted “to shorten the time that the legal challenges to death sentences take.” (Voter Information Guide, Gen. Elec. (Nov. 8, 2016), analysis of Prop. 66 by Legis. Analyst, p. 105 (2016 Voter Guide).) But Proposition 66 contains no plan to compress into five years a process that often takes two decades, and no entity - not this court, not the Judicial Council, not the Legislаture - can simply wave a magic wand and make it so. Although there may be ways to streamline the process, realistic reforms must emanate from a clear understanding of the way the postconviction death penalty process works in California. As explained below, the five-year limit is not grounded in the realities of California‘s death penalty process or in the reasonable possibilities for reform. Thus, in addition to lacking strict enforceability, the five-year limit cannot serve as a realistic benchmark to guide courts or the Judicial Council as they implement Proposition 66. It is instead “an exhortation to the parties and the courts to handle cases as expeditiously as is consistent with the fair and principled administration of justice.” (Maj. opn., ante, at p. 55.) Today there are nearly 750 prisoners on death row in California; they comprise roughly a quarter of all condemned inmates in the United States. The process for reviewing death judgments is complex and multilayered, and the incidence of reversible error is significant. (See U.S. Dept. of Justice, Bur. of Justice Statistics, Capital Punishment, 2013-Statistical Tables (2014) p. 19, tbl. 16, available at https://www.bjs.gov/content/pub/pdf/cp13st.pdf [as of Aug. 24, 2017] [reporting that 38 percent of the 8,466 prisoners sentenced to death between 1973 and 2013 had their convictions or sentences overturned]; Liebman et al., Capital Attrition: Error Rates in Capital Cases, 1973-1995 (2000) 78 Tex. L.Rev. 1839, 1850 [reporting that state and federal courts nationwide found prejudicial error in 68 percent of capital cases between 1973 and 1995].) In California, after a death judgment has been imposed in the trial court, the defendant is entitled to an automatic appeal to review any errors that may have occurred during trial. ( On average in California, it takes three to five years after a death judgment to appoint appellate counsel. (Jones v. Chappell (C.D. Cal. 2014) 31 F.Supp.3d 1050, 1056 (Jones), revd. by Jones v. Davis (9th Cir. 2015) 806 F.3d 538.) In April 2016, there were 49 capital defendants waiting for attorneys to be appointed for direct appeals and 360 capital defendants waiting for attorneys to be appointed for habeas corpus petitions. (2016 Voter Guide, supra, analysis of Prop. 66 by Legis. Analyst, p. 105.) About half of those waiting for appointment of habeas counsel have been waiting for over 10 years. (Jones, at p. 1058.) The dearth of attorneys willing to take on these assignments is due in part to the sheer enormity of the undertaking. A single death penalty case can and often does dominate a lawyer‘s practice for well more than a decade. Direct appeals in this court are completed on average 11.7 to 13.7 years after the death judgment. (Jones, supra, 31 F.Supp.3d at p. 1057.) Many appeals take considerably more time. (See, e.g., People v. O‘Malley (2016) 62 Cal.4th 944 [25 years from judgment of the death to resolution on appeal]; People v. Cunningham (2015) 61 Cal.4th 609 [19 years]; People v. Brown (2014) 59 Cal.4th 86 [18 years].) State habeas review is completed on average more than 17 years after the death judgment. (Jones, at p. 1059.) In April 2016, there were 337 direct appeals and 263 state habeas corpus petitions pending in this court. (2016 Voter Guide, supra, analysis of Prop. 66 by Legis. Analyst, p. 105.) As of 2014, only 81 inmates out of the more than 900 sentenced to death in California since 1978 have completed the postconviction review process in both state and federal court. (Jones, supra, 31 F.Supp.3d at p. 1060.) Of those 81, about half have received relief from their death sentences, 13 have been executed, and 17 have had their executions stayed. (Id. at p. 1069.) In 2008, the California Commission on the Fair Administration of Justice (Commission) studied the death penalty postconviction process. (Cal. Com. on the Fair Admin. of Justice, Final Report (2008) (Commission Report).) The Commission was chaired by former Attorney General and Los Angeles District Attorney John Van De Kamp, and it included law enforcement officials, prosecutors, public defenders, and academics. The Commission held hearings and gathered input from a broad cross-section of stakeholders. The Commission also addressed the backlog of death penalty appeals pending in this court. This court decides 20 to 25 death penalty appeals each year and issues a published opinion in each case. It typically takes two to three years for this court to decide an appeal once it has been fully briefed. (Commission Report, at p. 147.) The Commission endorsed the proposal of then Chief Justice Ronald George to amend the state Constitution so that this court would have discretion to transfer fully briefed death penalty appeals to intermediate appellate courts, provided that the Commission‘s recommendations for appointing appellate and habeas counsel were also implemented. (Commission Report, at pp. 147-148.) This court also decides approximately 30 habeas corpus petitions each year; although we do not typically issue published opinions in these cases, our deliberative process includes the preparation of lengthy internal memoranda carefully examining each issue raised in each petition. The Commission endorsed a proposal to allow capital habeas corpus petitions to be filed in superior court, with a right of appeal to the Court of Appeal and Supreme Court. (Id. at p. 148.) In 2013, a coalition of law enforcement officers, prosecutors, and crime victims proposed a ballot initiative, called the Death Penalty Reform and Savings Act of 2014 (2014 Proposed Initiative), that was similar in many ways to Proposition 66. The 2014 Proposed Initiative did not incorporate the Commission‘s proposals to expand the Office of the State Public Defender or the Habeas Corpus Resource Center. But it did include some of the other Commission recommendations. One of the Proposed Initiative‘s key provisions was an amendment of article VI, section 11, subdivision (a) of the California Constitution to provide that Courts of Appeal have appellate jurisdiction over death penalty cases, just as they have over other cases. (2014 Proposed Initiative, § 4.) Further, the 2014 Proposed Initiative would have added a new section to article VI authorizing this court to review Court Moreover, the 2014 Proposed Initiative would have amended article I, section 27 of the California Constitution to add a provision substantially similar to section 190.6, subdivision (d) (section 190.6(d)) as amended by Proposition 66. It would have provided that “[s]tate courts shall complete the state appeal and initial state habeas corpus review” within five years after entry of judgment or after adoption of Judicial Council rules to expedite the capital appeal process. (2014 Proposed Initiative, § 3.) After some signature gathering, the initiative proponents decided to postpone the effort until 2016. (Nirappili, Coalition Delays Initiative to Reform State Executions, Mercury News (May 11, 2014) p. B4.) Proposition 66, the result of that delayed effort, retains many of the features of the 2014 Proposed Initiative. But the proponents abandoned any effort to amend the California Constitution. (See Proposition 66 does not increase the availability of appellate and habeas attorneys, beyond requiring this court to compel certain criminal appellate attorneys to take death penalty appeals against their will. ( Further, the new provision that this court “shall only grant extensions of time for briefing for compelling or extraordinary reasons” ( Even if these measures do accelerate the filing of an appeal in this court, Proposition 66, unlike the 2014 Proposed Initiative, does not increase the number of courts hearing death penalty appeals. Because of the sheer scale of the briefing, the enormity of the record, and the number of claims typically raised by each defendant, this court devotes considerable time and attention to capital appeals. We could increase the number of such appeals we resоlve each year, but only at the expense of noncapital cases. As the court today makes clear, Proposition 66 cannot override the constitutional doctrine of separation of powers and compel this court to alter its docket by deciding more capital cases and fewer noncapital ones. (Maj. opn., ante, at p. 55 [construing § 190.6(d) “to maintain the courts’ discretionary control over the conduct of their business“].) To put the postconviction process into perspective, let us consider a real example. A case not far from the norm is that of Robert Mark Edwards. He was convicted of first degree murder with burglary-murder and torture-murder special circumstances, and he was sentenced to death in September 1998. Counsel was appointed four years later in October 2002. Counsel filed a record correction motion in October 2003. The record correction process was completed, and a record of appeal filed in this court, in February 2005. The record consists of 29 volumes of the clerk‘s transcript, with a total of 9,117 pages; this includes 6,597 pages of juror questionnaires. The reporter‘s transcript, i.e., the transcript of the trial, spans 39 volumes with a total of 5,957 pages. The opening brief (431 pages) was filed in December 2006; the Attorney General‘s brief (270 pages) was filed in February 2008, and the reply brief (140 pages) was filed in November 2008. Also in November 2008, counsel had to withdraw because he was being appointed to the superior court. New counsel was appointed in January 2009 and, after getting up to speed on the case, filed a 79-page supplemental brief in September 2010. A supplemental respondent‘s brief was filed in March 2011, and a supplemental reply brief was filed in April 2011. Additional supplemental briefing was ordered by this court in December 2012 to address recently decided cases of this court and the United States Supreme Court; this briefing was filed in January 2013. Altogether, the briefing raised some 38 issues. The case was argued in May 2013, and the judgment was affirmed in August 2013. (People v. Edwards (2013) 57 Cal.4th 658.) Meanwhile, habeas corpus counsel was not appointed until November 2010, 12 years after the death judgment. A 524-page habeas corpus petition was filed in November 2013. The Attorney General‘s 187-page informal response was filed in October 2014, and a 433-page reply to the informal response was filed in December 2015. The petition remains pending in this court. In Edwards‘s case, 19 years have passed since the judgment of death. The direct appeal has been completed, the state habeas corpus petition has not been decided, and the case has not yet begun its lengthy sojourn in federal In sum, the protracted nature of the postconviction death penalty process is the product of several factors, including chronic delays in appointing appellate and habeas counsel, limitations on funding for the Office of the State Public Defender and Habeas Corpus Resource Center, the enormity of the record and the scale of the parties’ briefing in light of the peculiar nature of the death penalty, and the fact that all appeals go to a single court, inevitably resulting in a bottleneck. I agree that In People v. Engram (2010) 50 Cal.4th 1131 (Engram), we addressed Thurmond v. Superior Court (1967) 66 Cal.2d 836 (Thurmond), a paternity action, involved statutory provisions requiring the court to grant a continuance when the attorney for one of the parties is a member of the Legislature and the Legislature is in session. We held that the provisions “should be given full force and effect wherever and whenever it may be done without unduly adversely affecting the rights of others,” and we prescribed a number of factors the court should consider in exercising its discretion as to whether a continuance should be granted. (Id. at p. 840.) In In re Shafter-Wasco Irr. Dist. (1942) 55 Cal.App.2d 484 (Shafter-Wasco), the court declined to treat as mandatory a statutory deadline requiring judicial resolution of an appeal concerning the dissolution of an irrigation district to be decided three months after the appeal is filed. The court instead construed the statute as directing the court “to give this appeal as early a hearing and decision as orderly procedure in this court will permit.” (Id. at p. 489.) In each of these cases, the court interpreted as “directive” a seemingly mandatory statute that threatened to impair core judicial functions, and the decisions make clear that courts have authority to determine the proper weight to be given to the statutory directive. That determination is contextual. In some cases, as in Thurmond, the directive statute can serve as a default that constrains judicial discretion unless certain conditions apply. (Thurmond, supra, 66 Cal.2d at p. 840.) In Engram, the force of the statute was more vague; we construed the directive to give priority to criminal cases over civil cases as subject to the open-ended condition that “such precedence [must be] consistent with the ends of justice.” (Engram, supra, 50 Cal.4th at p. 1161.) And Shafter-Wasco, in interpreting a statutory deadline as a directive “to give this appeal as early a hearing and decision as orderly procedure in this court will permit” (Shafter-Wasco, supra, 55 Cal.App.2d at p. 489), said it was ultimately up to the court to determine a reasonable timeframe for deciding the appeal. Directive statutes that set realistic time limits on judicial decisions may inform how quickly cases should be decided, although the issue is ultimately This impracticality is underscored by the fact that The delegation of broad rulemaking power to the Judicial Council spared the voters (and the proponents of Proposition 66) from having to make difficult choices as to what should be sacrificed for the sake of dramatically expediting the death penalty. But these are precisely the choices that the lawmaking authority, whether the Legislature or the electorate, must make with clarity, transparency, and fidelity to separation-of-powers principles if it wishes to create a mandate that can lawfully and practically guide the Judicial Council‘s quasi-legislative rulemaking. Such a mandate is lacking here. But whether Proposition 66 actually speeds up (or slows down) the process will have nothing to do with LIU, J. WE CONCUR: WERDEGAR, J. KRUGER, J. HOCH, J.* * Associate Justice of the Court of Appeal, Third Appellate District, assigned by the Chief Justice pursuant to CONCURRING AND DISSENTING OPINION BY CUÉLLAR, J. What voters most need so they can exercise their constitutionally protected franchise effectively is clarity and candor. Particularly at a time when public discourse dwells on foreign interference in our electoral process, social media bots, and manipulated Facebook news feeds, it is possible - perhaps even easy - to forget how millions of voters endeavor to familiarize themselves with the candidates and issues of the day, and to understand the consequences of their vote. Voters who sought to do so by studying Proposition 66, the Death Penalty Reform and Savings Act of 2016 (Proposition 66), would not recognize the initiative the majority purports to uphold today. What reasonable voters would have clearly recognized instead - based on the statutory text, the official description by the Legislative Analyst, and the arguments made by the initiative‘s proponents - is that Proposition 66 contained a genuine, enforceable, five-year deadline for completion of the state court appeal and resolution of the initial habeas corpus petition in death penalty cases. Candor requires us to be equally clear about whether such a deadline accords with our law: It does not. A statutory limit on the amount of time a court may spend deciding a case is an intrusion on quintessential judicial functions and violates the California Constitution‘s separation of powers provision. (See Proposition 66 further runs afoul of the California Constitution by purporting to authorize an appeal to the Court of Appeal from the decision of a superior court on an initial capital habeas corpus petition. (See Our first task is to answer a question as simple as it is important: What kind of time limit did the voters enact? When voters face the often daunting process of considering a new statute or constitutional amendment at the ballot box, state law directs the Secretary of State to prepare a voter information guide. The guide must include a complete copy of each proposed measure, the arguments and rebuttals for and against, and an analysis prepared by the Legislative Analyst. ( Now imagine a reasonable voter consulting the voter information guide to Proposition 66. What would the voter have gleaned - immediately - about the initiative‘s purpose? In the very first of its findings and declarations, the initiative stated that our “death penalty system is ineffective because of waste, delays, and inefficiencies.” (Voter Information Guide, Gen. Elec. (Nov. 8, To fulfill that explicit promise, the initiative added and amended various provisions of the Penal Code to include several new procedures. One of them was a requirement that “the state courts shall complete the state appeal and the initial state habeas corpus review in capital cases” within five years of the entry of judgment. ( Then the 2016 general election took place. With the aforementioned provisions at the heart of the initiative - and no doubt influenced by promises made in the Voter Guide - voters narrowly enacted Proposition 66. Petitioner then immediately filed this petition for writ of mandate. In it, he advanced a separation of powers challenge to the provision requiring California courts to resolve the automatic appeal and initial habeas corpus petition in capital cases within five years. But here‘s the twist: At oral argument, the initiative‘s proponents (intervener Californians to Mend, Not End, the Death Penalty) admitted that an actual five-year deadline would “perhaps not” be constitutional. The proponents instead let it slip that the initiative‘s five-year deadline is not a deadline after all, but just a “goal” that has no real consequence if it goes unmet. The Attorney General, also purportedly arguing in support of This is what might be charitably described as a novel reinterpretation of the initiative‘s five-year deadline for resolution of the automatic appeal and initial capital habeas corpus petition. It is at odds - entirely - with what the initiative says, how it was designed to work, and how it was sold. Even more remarkably, the majority blithely accepts this neutering of what clearly appeared to the voters to be a five-year deadline into a mere palaver on the processing of death penalty cases. And not just any palaver: By reimagining the initiative as nothing more than an earnest exhortation calling on courts to consider dialing up the speed of death penalty adjudication, the majority upholds something quite different from the initiative considered and enacted by the electorate, leaving in its wake uncertainty about how we interpret initiatives and whether the time limits included in Proposition 66 have any legal effect. Petitioner argues that a statute purporting to dictate when a court shall hear and determine a case would unconstitutionally interfere with the judiciary and violate the separation of powers. Both the Attorney General and intervener-proponents so concede. Little wonder: With but one exception, state supreme courts have unanimously concluded that the timing of a judicial decision is a core judicial function, protected from legislative encroachment. (State v. Buser (2015) P.3d ___ [302 Kan. 1, 9] (Buser); see, e.g., Sands v. Albert Pike Motor Hotel (Ark. 1968) 434 S.W.2d 288, 291-292 [“as laudable as the purpose intended may be,” requiring a court to decide a workers’ compensation case The majority does not contest a court‘s inherent authority to manage its docket in a manner that best promotes the pursuit of justice. (Maj. opn., ante, at p. 46.) What the majority claims instead is that, under our precedent, “statutes may not be given mandatory effect, despite mandatory phrasing, when strict enforcement would create constitutional problems.” (Id. at p. 49.) But the responsibility we shoulder is to render constitutional rulings clear enough to foster meaningful deliberation rather than simply offering vague references to “constitutional problems,” and to construe statutes in a manner that preserves the integrity of the democratic process. A statute‘s purpose is paramount and may not be disregarded. Language is not putty. And it is not for us to declare, in gross, that a legislative body will never be understood as having enacted an unconstitutional law, for the question whether the enacting body had such a purpose will depend on the particular statutory text, structure, and legislative history. So it is one thing to declare a statute unconstitutional when it cannot be saved, yet quite another to pretend Indeed, what we actually do when legislation might seem to regulate the time affordеd the judiciary to decide motions or cases is instead quite different from what the majority describes. We require a clear statement that such regulation was contemplated. (See Garrison v. Rourke (1948) 32 Cal.2d 430, 436 (Garrison) [“an intent to defeat the exercise of the court‘s jurisdiction will not be supplied by implication“].) This particular clear statement rule is one closely related to the constitutional avoidance canon, which requires courts to avoid, where possible, interpreting a statute in a way that might render it unconstitutional. (Ibid. [finding it unnecessary to decide whether a purported time limit for the resolution of an election contest would “defeat or interfere with the exercise of . . . the judicial power . . . in the absence, as here, of provisions clearly indicating that intent” (citations omitted, italics added)].) When faced with an attempt to impose a deadline on a court‘s decisionmaking power, we have sometimes found the absence of a clear statement to impose a mandatory or enforceable deadline where no ” ‘consequence or penalty is provided for failure to do the act within the time commanded.’ ” (Edwards v. Steele (1979) 25 Cal.3d 406, 410.) On other occasions, we have focused on “the likely consequences of holding a particular time limitation mandatory, in an attempt to ascertain whether those consequences would defeat or promote the purpose of the enactment.” (Ibid.) As this court recently (and unanimously) reiterated, ” ‘[t]here is no simple, mechanical test’ for making this determination.’ [Citation.] The question is ultimately one of legislative intent.” (Kabran v. Sharp Memorial Hospital (2017) 2 Cal.5th 330, 343, italics added (Kabran).) Indeed: Because the mandatory nature of a statutory deadline depends on intended legislative purpose, we may not simply characterize such a deadline as directive where (as here) “the Legislature clearly expresses a contrary intent.” (People v. Allen (2007) 42 Cal.4th 91, 102.) This, too, is the principle at the heart of our analysis in People v. Engram (2010) 50 Cal.4th 1131 (Engram). There, we held that A candid analysis of a statute‘s purpose was also pivotal to In re Shafter-Wasco Irr. Dist. (1942) 55 Cal.App.2d 484. The Court of Appeal construed a statute providing that an appeal of a judgment concerning an irrigation district‘s dissolution ” ‘must be heard and determined within three months after the taking of such appeal.’ ” (Id. at p. 486.) The Court of Appeal acknowledged that “[s]uch language is usually construed as mandatory,” but cautioned that it is also ” ‘in many cases . . . directory merely.’ ” (Id. at p. 488.) Because “courts should construe statutes so they may be held constitutional where it is reasonably possible to do so” (id. at p. 488), the Court of Appeal concluded that this language could and would be construed as reflecting a purpose to grant the appeal “as early a hearing and decision as orderly procedure in this court will permit” (id. at p. 489). And in Garrison, supra, 32 Cal.2d 430, we held that a statute providing that a court ” ‘shall’ ” (id. at p. 435) decide an election contest within 10 days should not be interpreted as mandatory where “the consequence or penalty for the failure of the court to file findings of fact and conclusions of law within the designated period was not included in the statute” (ibid.) and where a mandatory effect would “lead to the result of defeating the aims and purposes of the statute” (id. at p. 437). What we may not do, under the guise of the avoidance canon, is ” ‘rewrite the law or give the words an effect different from the plain and direct import of the terms used.’ ” (People v. Leal (2004) 33 Cal.4th 999, 1008; accord, Salinas v. United States (1997) 522 U.S. 52, 59-60.) For good reason: Invoking the canon when there‘s no plausible interpretation of a stаtute that can avoid a constitutional conflict does justice neither to the enacted statute, the voters’ I respectfully submit that the majority‘s construction of the five-year deadline in Which is exactly the opposite of what a directory interpretation does to the most reasonable understanding of the electorate‘s purpose in enacting the five-year deadline. Subdivision (e) of Note that a different subdivision of Although the text and structure at issue here are sufficient to demonstrate the voters’ purpose, the materials in the voter information guide extinguish whatever doubts could conceivably remain. As stated above, a heading in the Voter Guide‘s analysis told voters in bold and italicized type that Proposition 66 ”Requires Completion of Direct Appeal and Habeas Corpus Petition Process Within Five Years.” (Voter Guide, supra, analysis of Prop. 66 by Legis. Analyst, p. 106.) The Legislative Analyst went on to explain that “[i]f the process takes more than five years, victims or their attorneys could request a court order to address the delay.” (Ibid.) Whether this remedy is workable or not in principle, every last one of the cases cited by the majority lacks the essential ingredient clearly present here: a statutory provision explicitly providing for a penalty or consequence if the time limit were exceeded. It‘s quite telling that “neither the initiative‘s text nor its supporting materials describe any intention” to merely elaborate on the existing precatory language to expedite death penalty cases. (People v. Valencia (2017) 3 Cal.5th 347, 357 (Valencia).) This deadline has teeth — indeed, the kind of teeth a reasonable voter would have readily observed. Legis. Analyst, p. 107 [“the requirement that each challenge generally be completed in five years . . . could result in the filing of fewer, shorter legal documents“; “the ongoing fiscal impact of the measure on state costs related to legal challenges to death sentences is unknown“]; ibid. [“the state would incur annual cost increases in the near term to process hundreds of pending legal challenges within the time limits specified in the measure“; “such costs could be in the tens of millions of dollars annually for many years“]; cf. Valencia, supra, 3 Cal.5th at p. 365 [“the analysis provides no [fiscal] estimate of any effect on third strike offenders and their crimes nor any discussion of the fiscal effects on the state prison system“].) By construing the five-year deadline as mandatory, we promote, instead of defeat, the repeatedly highlighted purpose of the initiative. (Cf. Engram, supra, 50 Cal.4th at p. 1150 [construing the preference for criminal cases as mandatory would be inconsistent with the statutory purpose ” ‘to expedite these proceedings to the greatest degree that is consistent with the ends of justice’ “]; Garrison, supra, 32 Cal.2d at p. 437 [construing the 10-day limit as mandatory would “lead to the result of defeating the aims and purposes of the statute“].) In short, all relevant ballot materials reinforced the idea that the five-year deadline was mandatory and could be enforced by a petition for writ of mandate. The campaign for Proposition 66 itself did so, too. (See California Housing Finance Agency v. Patitucci (1978) 22 Cal.3d 171, 177 [“evidence of [the proposition‘s] purpose may be drawn from many sources“]; id. at p. 178 [examining whether a time limit is mandatory or directive “is ultimately one Given this backdrop, there is a straightforward, readily-grasped constitutional flaw in The majority‘s efforts to avoid this conclusion are far from convincing. is such a limitation in the first sentence of subdivision (e) — which addresses the validity of the underlying judgment or the viability of the appeal — but it is quite obvious that this sentence and the writ of mandate sentence serve different purposes and thus have different scopes of operation. The first sentence of new subdivision (e) represents a slight modification of Now consider the implication of inferring a restriction in the scope of this sentence, as the majority proposes. Doing so would mean that the “party” who had failed to submit a timely opening appellate brief would be able to seek relief from “a court” for “the delay” in the party‘s timely filing of its own brief — a remedy without a right if there ever was one. Given its context, the structure of the statute, and the materials presented to the voters, we can safely conclude that what the second sentence in subdivision (e) means is precisely what it says: Either party, or any victim, may seek relief by petition for writ of mandate when a court fails to comply with a deadline set forth in What‘s more, a reasonable member of the electorate would also have considered the concluding sentence of The majority says it must construe the five-year deadline as directory “regardless of how the ballot materials characterized” it because there is no “workable” means of enforcing the deadline. (Maj. opn., ante, at pp. 49, 52.) The majority cited no support for this conclusion because none exists, nor did it offer any compelling argument for why this approach makes sense. That the scheme is unworkable is both true and easily understood. Of course there‘s no tribunal in which a party could seek a writ of mandate directed to us. But even more important, compliance with the five-year deadline depends in large part on a series of discretionary determinations by superior courts, Yet the question before us is not the workability of an arrangement involving a petition for writ of mandate to enforce the five-year deadline. It is instead whether a reasonable voter would have understood the purpose of the mandate mechanism to make the five-year deadline not merely an aspiration, but an enforceable reality. And subdivision (e) of Moreover, nothing in our case law, the case law from any other jurisdiction, or in the inherent logic of constitutional or statutory interpretation makes the characterization of a statutory time limit for judicial processes turn on whether the enforcement mechanism would be “workable.” (Maj. opn., ante, at p. 52.) It‘s doubtful that any mechanism to enforce a statutory deadline on the resolution of a case or motion could ever be entirely workable, since such a deadline (as the majority concedes) would necessarily interfere with the court‘s control over its docket and thus violate the separation of powers. (See maj. opn., ante, at p. 54.) The majority‘s interpretive move, in reality, is to declare that it would never recognize any deadline as mandatory. Our court has the power to take a “different” approach from that of every other court inside or outside of California (ibid.), but it is hard to see how this approach squares with our mission, when interpreting a statute, to construe it in a Equally unpersuasive is the majority‘s next justification for construing the clearly mandatory deadline as merely directory. According to the majority, it was not sufficient that the text, structure, context, and legislative history demonstrated that the deadline was mandatory. Rather, the ballot materials also needed to inform the voters about “the details of an enforcement mechanism” and “how such an order could effectively result in compliance.” (Maj. opn., ante, at p. 52.) If such a requirement is to be plucked out of thin air — as I fear this one has been — then it needs a compelling substantive or institutional justification that the majority does not provide. To my knowledge, we have never required the voters to sit through a constitutional law lecture before we would be willing to interpret a law as it was written. Such a requirement strikes me as inconsistent with the very 83-year-old case the majority purports to be vindicating. Unlike this case, Lorraine did not even involve a constitutional challenge (Lorraine, supra, 220 Cal. at p. 756) — we instead considered only the mandatory/directory character of a statute providing that a court ” ‘shall’ ” postpone a trial or hearing for up to 30 days ” ‘when all attorneys of record of parties who have appeared in the action agree to such postponement.’ ” (Id. at p. 754.) Tellingly, we did not inquire whether the Legislature had sufficiently ruminated about “the details” of the rule‘s operation or what effect it would have on a court. Instead, in accordance with our longstanding rule that the mandatory/directory distinction “is ultimately one of legislative intent” (Kabran, supra, 2 Cal.5th at p. 343), we focused on whether the Legislature had “the intent to make the action of the parties compulsory upon the court in each instance.” (Lorraine, at p. 757; see also Thurmond, supra, 66 Cal.2d at p. 839.) Finding no such intent, we declared the statutory text to be properly interpreted as directory. (Lorraine, at p. 757.)10 At issue in Verio were amendments to two civil procedure statutes we had previously construed in Thurmond, supra, 66 Cal.2d 836 to be directory. (Verio, supra, 3 Cal.App.5th at p. 1325-1326.) In 1968, one year after Thurmond, the Legislature amended each of those statutes to add a new provision stating that a continuance or extension of time requested by a party or attorney who is a member of the Legislature then in session “is mandatory,” unless the court determined that the continuance or extension of time would defeat or abridge a right to relief in specified proceedings. ( The majority holds out Verio as an example of a court interpreting a statute as directory, despite its mandatory phrasing. Verio does not even mildly support the majority‘s position. The Verio court “refused to give the statutes mandatory effect” (maj. opn., ante, at p. 48) for the simple reason that the amendments making the statutes mandatory had been struck down as unconstitutional. (Verio, supra, 3 Cal.App.5th at p. 1330.) The remainder of the statutes, though, could still be given effect in a manner consistent with our jurisprudence on severability and the statutory design. (See Legislature v. Eu (1991) 54 Cal.3d 492, 535.) The invalid mandatory provisions were set forth in a separate subdivision (see Ironically, it is the part of Verio that is on point — the part declaring mandatory provisions unconstitutional — that the majority ignores. Instead the majority relies on the part of Verio that read directory language to be directory, but that part is of no assistance here. No one — not the majority, not the Attorney General, not the intervener-proponents — claims the five-year deadline is somehow severable from the mandatory aspects of the initiative. (See Katyal & Schmidt, Active Avoidance: The Modern Supreme Court and Legal Change (2015) 128 Harv. L.Rev. 2109, 2121, fn. 47 [“Whеn a court uses the rewriting power, it is, in effect, implicitly assuming the outcome of the severability analysis and acting with less candor and transparency than a court that does the analysis explicitly“].) And nothing in the record suggests the voters would have preferred a directory interpretation of the five-year deadline to its invalidation. To the contrary: Several statutes already offered what the majority calls “an exhortation to the parties and courts to handle cases as expeditiously as is consistent with the
fair and principled administration of justice.” (Maj. opn., ante, at p. 55; see Litigants and policymakers are unlikely to discover much improvement — or “benefit” (maj. opn., ante, at p. 44, fn. 28) — in the majority‘s implausible construction of the five-year deadline, either. It would be exceptionally difficult, and potentially quite fraught, for the Judicial Council to implement whatever might allegedly remain of the five-year time limit while preserving “the courts’ inherent authority over their dockets.” (Id. at p. 59.) So I agree with Justice Liu: The Judicial Council is under no compulsion to “Good luck” might be in order as well for those who contemplate a challenge to the constitutionality of other statutes and may now wonder whether this court will instead redraft laws to avoid “constitutional problems.” (Maj. opn., ante, at p. 49.) It is not judicial modesty that authorizes a court to distort the text of a statute in a way that subverts its purpose. Nor does judicial restraint justify a court deliberately reading a law to mean something other than what the voters enacted. When the majority says that it will construe statutes to be directory — despite their “mandatory phrasing,” despite what “the voters were told,” and despite what “the voters intended” as the statute‘s purpose (maj. opn., ante, at pp. 49, 53) — the act becomes precisely the opposite of judicial modesty. The court instead substitutes its own preferences, without justification, for those embodied in legislation. (See Manning, The Nondelegation Doctrine as a Canon of Avoidance (2000) Sup. Ct. Rev. 223, 255-256.) And while it may sometimes be possible for the legislative branch to correct a mistaken judicial construction of a statute it had duly enacted, that‘s an unlikely prospect here. Under the terms of the initiative, the newly minted five-year “goal” just announced by the majority and given some degree of legal weight by it can now be overturned only by a vote of three-fourths of the membership of each house of the Legislature, or by a whole new initiative. (See Voter Guide, supra, Prop. 66, § 20, p. 218.) Because, practically speaking, our word will be the last word, we really ought to fairly construe the law the voters actually enacted. The five-year deadline is not Proposition 66‘s only constitutional defect. The majority also errs in upholding new The majority concedes this new provision constitutes a “significant departure” from existing practice governing appellate review of capital habeas corpus petitions. (Maj. opn., ante, at p. 21.) But it is more than that: It is also unconstitutional. Unlike the majority, I would read the constitutional grant of appellate jurisdiction to this court ( Like most states that have retained the death penalty, California has entrusted appellate jurisdiction in death penalty cases to the state court of last resort. Under our state Constitution, “[t]he Supreme Court has appellate jurisdiction when judgment of death has been pronounced.” ( So it is the task of this court — and only this court — to exercise “exclusive jurisdiction ‘in death penalty cases’ because of ‘the extreme nature of the penalty.’ ” (Thompson, supra, 25 Cal.4th at p. 124, quoting Cal. Const. Revision Com., Proposed Revision (1966) p. 91.) Our concern over the gravity of the death penalty is widely shared by our sister jurisdictions. The high court has pointed out that a system providing for judicial review “in a court with statewide jurisdiction promote[s] the evenhanded, rational, and consistent imposition of death sentences under law.” (Jurek v. Texas (1976) 428 U.S. 262, 276; accord, State v. Ramirez (Ariz. 1994) 871 P.2d 237, 243; People v. Gaines (Ill. 1984) 473 N.E.2d 868, 878; see generally Uelman, Crocodiles in the Bathtub: Maintaining the Independence of State Supreme Courts in an Era of Judicial Politicization (1997) 72 Notre Dame L.Rev. 1133, 1138 [“The traditional answer, of course, is that consistency in administering the ultimate punishment demands final review by the same body of judges in every case“].) An appeal in a death penalty case encompasses more than the automatic appeal. It includes, for instance, an appeal from a petition for writ of error coram nobis, an appeal from a petition for writ of habeas corpus, or an apрeal from any other extraordinary writ attacking the judgment. Even if the details governing the procedure for these proceedings may vary, the need for evenhanded, rational, and consistent imposition of the death penalty does not: It is the same regardless of which means is used to attack the judgment. (See State v. Fourth Dist. Court of Appeal (Fla. 1997) 697 So.2d 70, 71 [“Collateral proceedings in death penalty cases are essentially attacks on the imposition of the death penalty. Because this Court has jurisdiction over death penalty cases, it is logical that such attacks be directed to this Court.“]; People v. Gaines, supra, 473 N.E.2d at p. 879 [“Statewide review, in this court, of post-conviction cases involving the death penalty will further the governmental interest in uniform and expeditious review of death sentences“]; State v. Niccum (N.C. 1977) 238 S.E.2d 141, 143-144 [because an appeal from a judgment that ” ‘includes a sentence of death or imprisonment for life’ ” lies directly to the supreme court, it “logically” follows that an appeal from a habeas corpus judgment involving a sentence of death or life imprisonment lies to the supreme court].) None of this is happenstance. We noted long ago the “pains that were there taken [by the Legislature] to limit the instances in which an appeal from the superior court in habeas corpus proceedings would be allowed” and acknowledged that “[t]he power of the Legislature to enact section 1506 has never been successfully challenged.” (In re Flodstrom (1955) 45 Cal.2d 307, 310.) Even earlier, in In re Alpine (1928) 203 Cal. 731, we recognized that “[s]ection 1506 provided for the first time in our legislative history that an appeal may be taken from the order of a superior court discharging a defendant after conviction to the district court of appeal, except in cases where judgment of death has been rendered, and in such cases to the supreme court.” (Alpine, at p. 745; see id. at pp. 745-746 [“Whatever doubt that existed [in 1913], as to whether a habeas corpus proceeding may fairly be said to be included in the terms of the constitution . . . has been removed by the unmistakable language of the statute that it is so included within the constitutional language. And we can see no objection on constitutional grounds against the power of the legislature to so provide.“]; In re Ketchel (1968) 68 Cal.2d 397, 399.) One year after former section 1506 was enacted, former As even intervener-proponents acknowledge, section 1506 deems the “final order of a superior court made upon the return of a writ of habeas corpus discharging a [capital] defendant or otherwise granting all or any part of the relief sought” to be a “criminal case[] where judgment of death has been rendered” — and, accordingly, one that can be appealed only to this court.11 The Legislature‘s construction of the constitutional provisions governing this court‘s appellate jurisdiction is thus fully consistent with the contextual reading of amended Apr. 10, 1984) p. 2 [“its provisions do not apply to appeals involving the death penalty. These cases currently must be reviewed directly by the Supreme Court, rather than being appealed first to the courts of appeal.“]; Assem. Office of Research, 3d reading analysis of Sen. Const. Amend. No. 29 (as amended Apr. 10, 1984) p. 2 [the transfer provisions “[w]ould not apply to an appeal involving a death penalty judgment“]; see also Grodin et al., The California State Constitution: A Reference Guide (1993) p. 126 [“Subsection (d) makes clear that the supreme court alone has responsibility . . . for deciding death penalty cases“].) This court has routinely understood the term “death penalty cases” to include capital habeas corpus proceedings. (E.g., In re Bacigalupo (2012) 55 Cal.4th 312, 314; In re Morgan (2010) 50 Cal.4th 932, 937-938; In re Carpenter (1995) 9 Cal.4th 634, 659.) Section 1506 was enacted against the backdrop of these constitutional constraints. It carries ” ‘a “strong presumption in favor of the Legislature‘s interpretation of a provision of the Constitution,” ’ ” and its ” ‘focused legislative judgment on the question enjoys significant weight and deference by the courts.’ ” (Property Reserve, Inc. v. Superior Court (2016) 1 Cal.5th 151, 192-193.) Indeed, around the time the Legislature enacted section 1506, this court had acknowledged that “the contemporaneous and long continued construction thereof by the legislature is entitled to great deference, and may be supposed to reflect the views of policy and modes of reasoning which prevailed among the framers of the Constitution.” (People v. S. Pac. Co. (1930) 209 Cal. 578, 595ante, at p. 28.) This euphemism significantly underplays the stakes here. Only one of these provisions can be constitutional. Either the Supreme Court has appellate jurisdiction over capital habeas corpus proceedings (in which case section 1506 is constitutional, and new section 1509.1 is not), or the Court of Appeal has appellate jurisdiction over capital habeas corpus proceedings (in which case new section 1509.1 is constitutional, and section 1506 is not). The majority chooses the latter option — and thus upends 90 years of settled law and belatedly declares that we were without jurisdiction “in its most fundamental sense” (maj. opn., ante, at p. 15) to hear the People‘s appeal in In re Carpenter, supra, 9 Cal.4th 634 and any other direct appeal from the superior court in a capital habeas corpus proceeding. Even worse, the reasons provided by the majority fail to justify this sudden about-face. It is the majority‘s primary contention that So where judgment of death has been pronounced — and the appeal challenges that judgment — appellate jurisdiction resides in this court. (Cf. Thompson, supra, 25 Cal.4th at p. 122 [“our exclusive jurisdiction over death penalty appeals” did not include an appeal where “[p]laintiffs challenged not the legality of that [death] judgment but the time at which Thompson‘s spiritual adviser of choice had to leave him before the execution“].) Indeed, this court has already declared that “appellate jurisdiction in criminal cases where judgment of death has been rendered” extends at least to “proceedings which attack such a judgment by motion to vacate or petition for the writ of error coram nobis.” (People v. Shorts (1948) 32 Cal.2d 502, 511.) Given the pervasive uncertainty as to whether certain defects “should I respectfully, but strongly, disagree with the majority that an interpretation of our appellate jurisdiction incorporating the full range of relevant considerations — including functional ones — would somehow be “anomalous.” (Maj. opn., ante, at p. 27.) It does matter whether the Court of Appeal has jurisdiction to review a superior court‘s capital habeas corpus ruling on appeal, rather than review that same ruling when the capital inmate files a new original petition there. Consider the purpose underlying our exclusive appellate jurisdiction in death penalty cases, and the difference between review by appeal and review by a new original writ petition. A system of direct review to the state court of last resort “promote[s] the evenhanded, rational, and consistent imposition of death sentences under law.” (Jurek v. Texas, supra, 428 U.S. at p. 276.) A system in which an appeal can be taken to the intermediate appellate court, by contrast, creates uncertainty. It allows for the possibility of conflicting rulings on a matter of ultimate concern: life, or death. An appeal triggers the right to present oral argument and an entitlement to a written opinion with reasons stated. (People v. Medina (1972) 6 Cal.3d 484, 489-490.) A petition for an extraordinary writ (such as a petition for writ of habeas corpus), on the other hand, can be summarily denied without oral argument or a written statement of reasons. (See id. at p. 490.) Indeed, summary denial of a habeas corpus petition or other petition for an extraordinary writ does not establish law of the case or have any res judicata effect in future proceedings. (Gomez v. Superior Court (2012) 54 Cal.4th 293, 305, fn. 6.) That‘s why virtually every one of our death penalty sister states requires that appeals from the death judgment as well as appeals from all postconviction proceedings attacking that judgment go directly to the state‘s highest court.13 The laws of these other statеs do not control here. But the approach to the review of death penalty cases in our sister states is near uniform. And this near-uniform practice also happens to conform to the approach endorsed by the American Bar Association. (ABA Stds. for Post Conviction Remedies, std. 22-5.1 [“Appellate review should be available through the same courts authorized to hear appeals from judgments of conviction“].) All this should cause us to wonder precisely what it is about the California Constitution that demonstrates an intent or purpose to deviate from the general path.14 Indeed, given this court‘s “unique role in overseeing the imposition of capital punishment in this state” (In re Reno (2012) 55 Cal.4th 428, 522), there should be some signal that the voters who enacted these constitutional provisions contemplated a deviation from the overwhelmingly common practice if the majority‘s view were the correct one, and one would expect some explanation from the majority as to why. But none appears. What becomes apparent instead is the risk that the majority‘s narrow construction of N.E.2d at p. 879; State v. Niccum, supra, 238 S.E.2d at pp. 143-144.) Such a scheme would multiply the risk of conflicting rulings — even though the prospect of conflicting rulings on these issues was precisely the evil at which The remaining question is whether the provision barring the use of a “successive petition” (read “new petition” (maj. opn., ante, at pp. 21-22, fn. 14)) “as a means of reviewing a denial of habeas relief” ( Severability is not possible here under any reasonable understanding of what‘s meant by grammatically, functionally, and volitionally. Nothing in the text of Proposition 66, its structure, or its history reveals a purpose to preclude appellate courts altogether from reviewing a sentencing court‘s ruling on a habeas corpus petition. Just the opposite: the initiative proposed merely to shift the means of review from the filing of a new petition in a higher court to an appeal to a higher court. “Volitional” severability turns on whether “the remainder of the measure probably would have been adopted by the people even if they had foreseen the success of petitioners’ . . . challenge.” (Raven v. Deukmejian (1990) 52 Cal.3d 336, 356; see Matosantos, supra, 53 Cal.4th at p. 231, 271.) The switch from one avenue (filing of a new petition) to the other (appeal) plainly was dependent on the assumption that the latter offered an available means of review. (See Gerken v. Fair Political Practices Com. (1993) 6 Cal.4th 707, 718.) Had reasonable voters foreseen that the appeal mechanism would be invalidated, one cannot say “with confidence” that they would have adopted the ban on new petitions as a means of review. (Id. at p. 714.) So I would invalidate The bait-and-switch undertaken by the proponents of Proposition 66 — and countenanced by the majority — will do nothing but breed cynicism in the electorate and supply further kindling to those who doubt the efficacy and workability of constitutional democracy. As an inducement to support this initiative, voters were promised that state court review of death penalty judgments could and would be completed within five years. That promise, as the majority concedes, was a sham. But the way to prevent similar swindles in the future is to be clear about what It is the voters’ job to decide whether to enact laws by initiative. It is our job to interpret and give effect to those duly enacted laws when called upon to do so, but also to uphold the supreme law of the land — our state and federal constitutions — when the challenged law transgresses those founding This is one such occasion. What was presented to the voters in Proposition 66 was a mandatory five-year deadline for resolution of the state court appeal and the initial habeas corpus petition for capital inmates. That‘s what the voters enacted. We know the resulting deadline is mandatory from its text, its structure, the deadline‘s description in the ballot materials, statements by the initiative‘s proponents, and general media coverage of the Proposition 66 campaign. And our established precedent underscores why we are not free to construe a deadline as directory where, as here, the enacting body “clearly expresses a contrary intent.” (People v. Allen, supra, 42 Cal.4th at p. 102; see Kabran, supra, 2 Cal.5th at p. 343 [“The question is ultimately one of legislative intent“]; Garrison, supra, 32 Cal.2d at p. 435 [statute will be construed as mandatory where “that result is expressly provided or otherwise clearly intended“].) When we foist a directory interpretation with potentially vague and unspecified consequences on a provision that cannot reasonably support it, we impair the candid public deliberation that makes democracy effective. A mandatory deadline, as all the parties agree, is not constitutional. Because that is precisely what the voters enacted, we must be equally clear and invalidate it. (See Valencia, supra, 3 Cal.5th at p. 386 (conc. opn. of Kruger, J.) [“In interpreting a voter initiative, we are bound to respect both the choices the voters have made and the limits of those choices“].) I therefore cannot join the majority in upholding some newly manufactured version of CUÉLLAR, J. I CONCUR: IKOLA, J.* * Associate Justice of the Court of Appeal, Fourth Appellate District, Division Three, assigned by the Chief Justice pursuant to C. The Habeas Corpus Resource Center
II. DISCUSSION
A. The Single-subject Claim
B. The Jurisdictional Habeas Corpus Claims
1. Transfer to the Sentencing Court
3. Appellate Review
C. The Equal Protection Claim
D. The Separation of Powers Claims
2. The Restriction on Untimely and Successive Petitions
3. Time Limits
E. The Effective Date of Proposition 66
III. DISPOSITION
I.
II.
I.
A.
B.
II.
III.
Notes
“(a) The Legislature finds that the sentence in all capital cases should be imposed expeditiously.
“(b) Therefore, in all cases in which a sentence of death has been imposed on or after January 1, 1997, the opening appellate brief in the appeal to the State Supreme Court shall be filed no later than seven months after the certification of the record for completeness under subdivision (d) of Section 190.8 or receipt by the appellant‘s counsel of the completed record, whichever is later, except for good cause. However, in those cases where the trial transcript exceeds 10,000 pages, the briefing shall be completed within the time limits and pursuant to the procedures set by the rules of court adopted by the Judicial Council.
“(c) In all cases in which a sentence of death has been imposed on or after January 1, 1997, it is the Legislature‘s goal that the appeal be decided and an opinion reaching the merits be filed within 210 days of the completion of the briefing. However, where the appeal and a petition for writ of habeas corpus is heard at the same time, the petition should be decided and an opinion reaching the merits should be filed within 210 days of the completion of the briefing for the petition.
“(d) The right of victims of crime to a prompt and final conclusion, as provided in paragraph (9) of subdivision (b) of Section 28 of Article I of the California Constitution, includes the right to have judgments of death carried out within a reasonable time. Within 18 months оf the effective date of this initiative, the Judicial Council shall adopt initial rules and standards of administration designed to expedite the processing of capital appeals and state habeas corpus review. Within five years of the adoption of the initial rules or the entry of judgment, whichever is later, the state courts shall complete the state appeal and the initial state habeas corpus review in capital cases. The Judicial Council shall continuously monitor the timeliness of review of capital cases and shall amend the rules and standards as necessary to complete the state appeal and initial state habeas corpus proceedings within the five-year period provided in this subdivision.
“(e) The failure of the parties or of a court to comply with the time limit in subdivision (b) shall not affect the validity of the judgment or require dismissal of an appeal or habeas corpus petition. If a court fails to comply without extraordinary and compelling reasons justifying the delay, either party or any victim of the offense may seek relief by petition for writ of mandate. The court in which the petition is filed shall act on it within 60 days of filing. Paragraph (1) of subdivision (c) of Section 28 of Article I of the California Constitution, regarding standing to enforce victims’ rights, applies to this subdivision and subdivision (d).”
Petitioner also relies on the provisions of
The Ohio court‘s reasoning is consistent with the equal protection principle that the pertinеnt inquiry is whether persons are similarly situated for purposes of the law challenged. (See People v. Guzman, supra, 35 Cal.4th at p. 592.) As explained above, the successive petition restrictions of