BILL ANALYSIS
AB 159
Page 1
ASSEMBLY THIRD READING
AB 159 (Jones)
As Amended June 1, 2007
Majority vote
JUDICIARY 10-0 APPROPRIATIONS 13-4
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|Ayes:|Jones, Tran, Adams, |Ayes:|Leno, Caballero, Davis, |
| |Evans, Feuer, Keene, | |DeSaulnier, Huffman, |
| |Krekorian, Laird, Levine, | |Karnette, Krekorian, |
| |Lieber | |Lieu, Ma, Nakanishi, |
| | | |Nava, Solorio, Feuer |
| | | | |
|-----+--------------------------+-----+--------------------------|
| | |Nays:|Walters, Emmerson, La |
| | | |Malfa, Sharon Runner |
| | | | |
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SUMMARY : Seeks to authorize new superior court judgeships and
the conversion of 162 existing subordinate judicial officer
(SJO) positions to judgeships upon the vacancy of SJO positions.
Specifically, this bill :
1)Creates an unspecified number of new superior court
judgeships, upon appropriation by the Legislature, pursuant to
specified uniform and objective criteria as updated and
approved by the Judicial Council on February 23, 2007.
2)Authorizes the conversion of 162 SJO positions to superior
court judgeships, upon subsequent appropriation by the
Legislature, pursuant to specified uniform and objective
criteria approved by the Judicial Council, except that no more
than 16 SJO positions may be converted in any calendar year.
3)Declares the Legislature's intent in enacting this SJO
conversion program to restore an appropriate balance between
subordinate judicial officers and judges, and to ensure that
critical case types are heard by superior court judges.
4)Clarifies that the Governor shall release demographic data
relative to ethnicity, race and gender of all judicial
appointments or nominations.
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5)Continues in place last year's requirement that the Judicial
Council, on or before November 1 of this year, adopt and
report to the Legislature annually thereafter upon, judicial
administration standards and measures that promote the fair
and efficient administration of justice.
6)Continues in place last year's requirements that on or before
March 1 of this year, and annually thereafter, all of the
following shall occur: a) the Governor shall disclose
aggregate statewide demographic data provided by all judicial
applicants relative to ethnicity and gender; b) the designated
agency of the State Bar responsible for evaluation of judicial
candidates shall collect and release statewide demographic
data provided by judicial applicants reviewed and a statewide
summary of the recommendations of the designated agency by
ethnicity and gender; and, c) the Administrative Office of the
Courts shall collect and release the demographic data provided
by justices and judges relative to ethnicity and gender by
specific jurisdiction.
EXISTING LAW :
1)Provides that the Legislature shall prescribe the number of
judges and provide for the officers and employees of each
superior court.
2)Authorizes 50 new trial court judgeships pursuant to
appropriation by the Legislature in 2006-2007.
3)Requires that on or before March 1 of this year, and annually
thereafter, all of the following shall occur: a) the Governor
shall disclose aggregate statewide demographic data provided
by all judicial applicants relative to ethnicity and gender;
b) the designated agency of the State Bar responsible for
evaluation of judicial candidates shall collect and release
statewide demographic data provided by judicial applicants
reviewed and a statewide summary of the recommendations of the
designated agency by ethnicity and gender; and, c) the
Administrative Office of the Courts shall collect and release
the demographic data provided by justices and judges relative
to ethnicity and gender by specific jurisdiction.
FISCAL EFFECT : According to the Assembly Appropriations
Committee:
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1)Assuming 50 new superior court judgeships, annual GF costs of
$40.6 million and $26.6 million in one-time costs for
additional and modified facilities and for equipment.
The Judicial Council is requesting $30 million in the 2007-08
Budget to cover the one-time costs plus one-month's cost of the
new judgeships.
2)For each conversion of an SJO position to a judgeship, the
additional annual cost, based on salary differences between
the two positions, is approximately $30,000. The total cost to
convert 162 current SJOs would therefore be $4.9 million.
This additional cost will occur incrementally over several
years as conversions are implemented, and the courts intend to
absorb these costs.
COMMENTS : This bill, sponsored by the judicial branch of our
government, seeks to make progress in adding judicial resources
to an increasingly overburdened court system.
In support of the measure, the author states:
California is facing a severe shortage of trial court
judgeships. As you know, access to the courts is
fundamentally compromised by judicial shortages.
Every Californian is constitutionally entitled to
impartial and timely resolution of disputes through
the courts. The current shortage of judicial resources
means that civil proceedings, family law hearings, and
probate matters are routinely rescheduled. It means
that litigants cannot get matters heard, public safety
is compromised, and it makes for an unstable business
climate. It fundamentally means Californians cannot
get fair, timely, and equitable justice they seek
every day in our courts. An analysis prepared by the
National Center for State Courts, and updated by the
Judicial Council, shows that California suffers from a
shortages of in excess of 360 trial court judges.
This bill, which has no opposition and bi-partisan
support, will continue our effort, commenced last
year, to strengthen our quality of justice in
California.
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According to the Judicial Council, since 1980, the total number
of new judges in the trial courts has grown by approximately 20
percent. However during the same period, total population in
California grew by more than 50 percent. With the enactment of
last year's SB 56, there are currently 1548 authorized superior
court judgeships and about another 422 commissioner and referee
positions, for a total of 1,970 "Authorized Judicial Positions"
(AJPs). The Judicial Council, however, states that current
judicial workload requires the services of several hundred more
judges to reach a total of 2,332 "Judicial Position
Equivalents"(JPEs).
The Judicial Council reports that the state faces a "judicial
gap" that portends a number of disturbing long term
consequences: a significant decrease in Californians' access to
the courts; compromised public safety, an unstable business
climate, and, in some courts, enormous backlogs that inhibit
fair, timely, and equitable justice. According to the Judicial
Council, this judicial gap arises because the number of trial
court judges has not kept pace with population growth, and the
concomitant increased demands placed on the courts. Between
1990 and 2000, for example, California's population grew by over
16 percent. Yet the Judicial Council notes that the number of
new judgeships grew by less than three percent. (Even with the
50 new judgeships authorized pursuant to last year's SB 56 added
in, since fiscal year 1990-91, the number of new judgeships has
increased by only six percent.) The Judicial Council asserts
that passage of this measure will reduce court backlogs, promote
the speedy resolution of civil disputes, increase public safety,
and foster a stable environment for state businesses. The
Judicial Council points out that its uniform and objective
assessment criteria contained in its 2001 and 2004 Judicial
Needs Studies identified a statewide need for 355 new trial
court judgeships.
According to the Judicial Council, the court system, faced with
a large shortage of judges, has been forced to meet its workload
demands by appointing commissioners and referees to act as
temporary judges. However the Council notes this is not a
viable long term solution. Increased reliance on "SJOs"
(subordinate judicial officers) has resulted in many critical
court proceedings being heard by judicial officers who are not
accountable to the public. Statewide, SJOs typically spend an
average of 55 percent of their time serving as temporary judges;
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in large courts the proportion is 75 to 80 percent. This bill
allows up to 16 SJO positions to be converted to superior court
judgeships annually.
When considering the merits of last year's legislation seeking
to authorize 50 new judgeships, the Speaker of the Assembly and
Chair of this Committee insisted that before more judgeships
would be authorized, new mechanisms would need to be adopted to
help address the lack of ethnic and gender diversity within the
judicial branch. As part of their efforts to address this
serious deficiency, unprecedented new diversity reporting
requirements were negotiated with and agreed to by the Governor
to begin the challenging process of addressing this problem.
The State Bar, the Governor's Office, and the Judicial Council
were all required to prepare and issue reports on the diversity
of the judicial applicant pool and of the existing judiciary.
Last March, these three reports were issued, and they underscore
just how insufficiently diverse California's judicial branch
currently is.
As noted in subsequent news analyses of the reports, the
counties of Alameda, Los Angeles and San Francisco were reported
to have the most ethnically diverse superior court benches among
California's large counties, while San Francisco has the highest
percentage of women. In Los Angeles, 39 percent of the judges
who answered the survey described themselves as ethnic
minorities. According to these initial statistics, the least
diverse superior court bench amongst large counties is currently
found in Contra Costa, with 82 percent of the bench reportedly
not ethnically diverse. As for women, San Francisco holds the
distinction of being the only large county with as many women as
men (50 percent each).
There are also a remarkable number of trial courts in California
that have all male judges and no female judges.
The Los Angeles Times editorialized on the startling lack of
diversity reflected by the newly reported data. In its
editorial entitled "Judges don't do justice to California's
diversity," the Times wrote on March 5, 2007, that:
Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's judicial appointments
have hardly reflected California's ethnic diversity.
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Of his 209 appointments since taking office, only 15
have been Latino, while 15 have been Asian-American
and nine African American. That's under 20% of his
appointees, although California is a majority minority
state. Here's the rub: Schwarzenegger may be doing
the best he can? A governor's judicial appointments
must come from his pool of applicants, and
Schwarzenegger's remains overwhelmingly white. That's
partly because most California lawyers are white - and
a decade ago even more of them were white. (Anyone
wanting to serve as a Superior Court judge must have
logged at least 10 years as a member in good standing
of the State Bar of California.) Last year, of the
328 judicial applicants to the governor's office,
13.4% were Latino, 10.4% were African American and
4.9% were Asian. (The figures are estimates because
some applicants decline to state their race.) ? These
percentages look good when compared to similar
percentages of members of the State Bar who are
minorities. But the numbers remain far below what
they would need to be to be representative of the
state's population as a whole. ?And that could be
trouble. In a society based on the rule of law, it is
crucial that judges, lawyers, litigants and criminal
defendants have faith that courts can mete out justice
impartially. That faith can be undermined by a court
system in which successive generations of judges are
disproportionately members of one ethnic group and
litigants and defendants are overwhelmingly members of
another? Although Schwarzenegger can appoint only from
the applicant pool, he can encourage more Latino,
black and Asian lawyers to apply, as then-Gov. Jerry
Brown did in the 1970s. Schwarzenegger's efforts have
already helped to expand the minority applicant pool
from under 20% to 29%. He is doing better than his
predecessor, former Gov. Gray Davis. ?Still, for a
bench that better reflects the state's people, there
must be an even more representative applicant pool -
which in turn means more minority lawyers, more
diverse law schools and, ultimately, schools that
expand opportunity and encourage all students to
excel.
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Analysis Prepared by : Drew Liebert / JUD. / (916) 319-2334
FN: 0001275