Bird Calls Opposition’s Attack ‘Mean-Spirited’

The day after her landslide defeat, Rose Elizabeth Bird said she plans to write a book that will discuss her nine-year career as California’s first woman chief justice and the first chief justice in 50 years to be voted out of office.

Speaking on a KCBS-TV talk show Wednesday afternoon, Bird described the campaign that led to her defeat and that of Associate Justices Joseph R. Grodin and Cruz Reynoso as “mean-spirited” and “destructive.”

And she said Republican Gov. George Deukmejian’s opposition to her and the other justices was the deciding influence in the election.

“For the first time since 1934 in California, we now have partisan politics governing who is going to sit on the Supreme Court because the results in the races (of the justices) were almost the same as the vote for governor (in his reelection victory), and the governor essentially said, ‘I would like to have these people removed and I would like to make their appointments.’ ”

While Bird was giving her interpretation of the election, and discussing her plans for the book, others involved in the election were saying that Bird bears a large share of responsibility for the demise of the court’s liberal majority, which lost three of its five members.

The view is not universally held, with many people believing that the death penalty issue was so great and the opposition so skillful that the election result was unavoidable.

‘Death Penalty Election’

“It was a death penalty election. That was the overwhelming, predominant factor. I’m not sure anything could have been done differently to avoid the outcome,” said Los Angeles lawyer Warren Christopher, one of several prominent supporters of the justices.

But supporters of Grodin, who was given the best chance for reelection, sounded particularly bitter toward Bird on Wednesday, arguing that her judgments on the bench and on the campaign trail hurt Grodin and Reynoso.

“To this day I don’t think she understands the damage she did to the court by the way she conducted herself as a judge and the way she communicated with the public,” said George Kieffer, a Los Angeles lawyer and Southern California coordinator for Grodin’s campaign.

“She claimed to be depoliticizing the court, but everything she did had the opposite effect. Her concurring and dissenting opinions were always a little farther out than those of the other liberals. Her attacks on the governor debased the campaign, and people’s reaction to it all just washed over the other two justices.”

David Townsend, a political consultant hired by Grodin, said Bird should have quit the court in an effort to spare her colleagues the political fallout she brought down on all of them.

“The way the polls were going, the noble thing would have been for the chief justice to step down for the sake of Grodin and Reynoso,” he said.

Neil Rincover, Reynoso’s campaign manager, took a more charitable view of the chief justice’s role and refused to blame her for the defeat of the justices.

“She didn’t start the fight. She took the high road all the way. It was the politicians who discovered the usefulness of court-bashing that are to blame for what happened to the court,” Rincover said.

Reynoso’s Statement

Neither Grodin nor Reynoso was available to talk about the election Wednesday, although Reynoso released a brief statement thanking the people of California “for the chance to serve over a decade as an associate justice of the Court of Appeal and the Supreme Court.”

Reynoso, the first Latino member of the court, lost by a margin of 20 percentage points, compared to losing margins of 14 points for Grodin and 32 points for Bird.

A Los Angeles Times exit poll showed that 49% of Latino voters said they supported Reynoso and 39% indicated they voted against him, with 12% saying they did not vote in that race.

Los Angeles attorney Vilma Martinez, a former president of the Mexican American Legal Defense Fund who served as Reynoso’s campaign treasurer, said Wednesday that she did not see much evidence of racism in Reynoso’s defeat.

“I think there are some signs of it. After all, he did lose by a few more points than Grodin. But I think the primary reason for the defeat of all of them was the death penalty issue,” Martinez said.

She added, however, that Reynoso’s defeat represented the loss of an important symbol to the Mexican-American community.

Los Angeles City Councilman Richard Alatorre also said he does not think race was the deciding factor in Reynoso’s loss, that it was, rather, the link with Bird.

“I think it was racial, but it was mainly a matter of being caught in the Bird court, along with Grodin,” Alatorre said.

“It’s a real sad commentary,” Alatorre said, “because I don’t think you could find a more honest, or a more thoughtful judge than Cruz Reynoso.”

It had been apparent since June, when opposition groups announced their intent to concentrate more on the two associate justices, that Grodin and Reynoso were concerned about getting caught up in the momentum of the anti-Bird movement.

That movement began shortly after Bird was appointed in 1977. The next year, agribusiness critics of her policies as secretary of agriculture and services and a group of conservative law-and-order advocates came close to defeating her at the polls the first time she was on the ballot.

Over the next several years, Bird’s frequent and well publicized feuding with other justices on the court and her opinions upholding the rights of criminal defendants, especially defendants facing the death penalty, continued to make her a magnet of controversy.

By the time she had been in office five years, two books had been written about her, one highly critical and one quite laudatory. She had also become the most conspicuous survivor of the administration of Edmund G. Brown Jr., the much vilified former governor who had brought Bird into his Cabinet and later appointed her chief justice.

Brown has been in Japan since August, a spokesman said. Brown made only one public statement about the chief justice’s campaign. It was a defense of Bird, which Brown submitted in column form to newspapers in the state.

Association With Brown

I. A. Lewis, director of the Los Angeles Times Poll, said Wednesday that the public’s association of Bird with Brown began to show up as a factor in her unpopularity with voters in some of the earliest public opinion polls on the chief justice.

By early 1985, according to most poll takers in the state, public opinion about Bird was pretty well settled. More than a year before the election, a majority of people had decided they would vote against her.

“It was remarkable. Such a high proportion of crystallized votes that were just unshakable,” said Mervyn Field, whose California Poll started tracking Bird in February, 1985.

But while they agreed that she was unpopular with voters, the polls offered differing insights into why people disapproved of her.

The results of a California Poll conducted in August of this year indicated that most people thought Bird was qualified to be chief justice and believed that she made her rulings independent of political pressure. On the other hand, the poll found that a majority thought that Bird went too far in protecting the rights of criminal defendants and allowed her personal opinions to affect her decisions.

However, pollster Stephen Teichner said findings from an exit poll he conducted Tuesday indicated that most voters regarded Bird as a judge who injected politics into court decisions, despite the central argument of her campaign that she was fighting to keep politics out of the court.

Times Exit Survey

The view of Bird as someone with a strong liberal bent was reinforced by a Los Angeles Times Poll exit survey that found that Republicans voted against Bird by a margin of 86% to 12% and that conservative Republicans voted against her by a margin of 92% to 7%.

Both the Times Poll and the California Poll found that voting on Bird was a major factor in people’s decision to go to the polls Tuesday. Asked what race they were most interested in, voters responding to both polls said their first concern was the governor’s race and their second the issue of Bird’s reconfirmation.

“That’s a dramatic finding,” said Mark DiCamillo, managing director of the California Poll. “Usually, judges just don’t command that sort of interest.”

If people were searching their ballots for Bird’s name, it means they were led to the names of Grodin and Reynoso as well.

“Obviously, she had a lot to do with the others getting voted out,” DiCamillo said.

There are those, including some friends and foes of Bird, who believe that if Brown had appointed Bird to the court, but as an associate justice, and someone else chief justice, the court would not have been a target for such a devastating political attack.

Mosk Easily Reelected

“If Stanley Mosk had been chief justice, I don’t think this would have been as bad,” said George Rosenberg, a Los Angeles lawyer who spearheaded fund raising for Bird.

While he is one of the liberals on the court and was on the ballot Tuesday, Mosk was easily reelected. The groups organized to defeat Bird, Grodin and Reynoso decided early in the campaign not to oppose Mosk.

“Mosk was the court’s senior member. He had a lot more death penalty affirmances, and he was regarded as a savvy politician who would not have been an inviting target,” Rosenberg said.

But Rosenberg said that, despite the outcome of the election, he is glad that Bird was appointed chief justice.

“When all is said and done, I am confident that she will be remembered as a great chief justice,” he said.