By Dan Morain, Senior editor
dmorain@sacbee.com The Sacramento Bee
Published: Sunday, Jul. 25, 2010 – 12:00 am | Page 1E
Last Modified: Sunday, Jul. 25, 2010 – 10:31 am

The ghost of one California chief justice is about to reappear this campaign season as a new chief justice heads to certain confirmation.

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger nominated Tani Cantil-Sakauye as chief justice, a step that places the appointment power of governors before voters.

In their money-is-no-object campaign, advisers to Meg Whitman, the Republican running to replace Schwarzenegger, intend to seize the moment and poke Democrat Jerry Brown over how he used his powers to select Rose Elizabeth Bird as chief justice when he was governor the first time.

“It is a good moment to begin that re-examination of that aspect of Jerry Brown’s record,” Whitman strategist Mike Murphy told me.

Whitman’s team believes it plays into their theme that Brown has a history as a “failed” politician. By law, Brown will be on the panel that considers Cantil-Sakauye’s confirmation, and she will appear on the ballot along with Brown, Whitman and the other candidates and issues.

“The whole process reminds people that governors make important judicial appointments,” Murphy said. “Rose Bird is going to get more famous, and she should.”

Cantil-Sakauye (pronounced cahn-TEEL sah-kah-OO-way) would be the second woman to serve as California’s chief justice. She couldn’t be more different from the first who filled the post.

Cantil-Sakauye, 50, has been a judge for 20 years. She generally sides with law enforcement on criminal justice issues but is a social moderate. Colleagues describe her as open-minded and a consensus builder, not words ever applied to Bird.

She has an only-in-America story. She is married to a Sacramento police lieutenant, whose Japanese American parents were interned during World War II.

Cantil-Sakauye is the daughter of Filipino immigrants who insisted that their children excel in school – public schools at that. She was homecoming queen and cheerleader at C.K. McClatchy High School, Class of ’77, one of the smart kids who engaged in student government.

At the diverse McClatchy campus, “Tani was a person who broke across all of the different ethnic barriers,” recalled Karen Skelton, a high school friend and Democratic attorney.

Cantil-Sakauye got her law degree at UC Davis School of Law, Class of 1984, where she was friends with Darrell Steinberg, now president pro tem of the state Senate.

“You could tell she was a star,” Steinberg said.

While hunting for a job after law school, she dealt blackjack in Reno, sought work in the Sacramento County Public Defender’s Office and landed as a deputy district attorney.

She came to the attention of Gov. George Deukmejian’s legal affairs secretary, Vance Rae, who invited her to join the administration in the late 1980s. Deukmejian appointed her to the bench in 1990. Schwarzenegger appointed her in 2005 to the 3rd District Court of Appeal, where Rae also serves.

Rae calls her “a great colleague.” It’s a view that cuts across ideological lines. Appellate Judge Coleman Blease, who started his career in the 1960s as a white-hat lobbyist for the ACLU, said Cantil-Sakauye “has all those qualities you would like in a colleague.”

She’s no neophyte. As a staffer in the Deukmejian administration, Cantil-Sakauye had an up-close view of the court politics of the day.

Deukmejian led the 1986 campaign to oust Bird and two other Brown appointees, and proceeded to pack the Supreme Court with three justices, giving Republicans a majority they hold to this day. Not many reporters still standing covered the Bird Court. I’m one, having been assigned to the beat in 1984 through the rancorous 1986 election.

Brown, as was his wont, sought to tweak the establishment by appointing Bird to head the judicial branch of government even though she had never been a judge. He certainly stirred up the system, but not for the good.

Bird became chief justice in 1977, just in time to interpret laws approved by the Legislature and by initiative reinstating the death penalty, after a previous California Supreme Court and the U.S. Supreme Court had struck down capital punishment laws earlier that decade.

A Field Poll last week showed that 70 percent of voters support the death penalty. It was an even more powerful issue in the 1980s, when support was up around 80 percent.

Bird found reason to vote to overturn convictions and sentences of death row inmates, casting votes to reverse 64 capital cases that came before her.

The cases involved horrible people who committed heinous crimes, serial killers like Rodney James Alcala who stalked and killed young girls, and recently was retried and convicted again by an Orange County jury. There was the guy who raped his stepmother and hog-tied her so that she would slowly strangle, and the hit man who took an ice pick to one man and suffocated a woman by sticking a rubber ball in her mouth.

Steve Glazer, managing Jerry Brown’s current gubernatorial campaign, tried to manage Bird’s retention effort. He didn’t have much luck. Bird contended that as a judge she was constrained from politicking.

Suffering parents of murder victims were the public face of the campaign against her, though much of the funding came from corporate interests stung by the court’s rulings in civil cases that expanded the right to sue.

Even if she had been willing to campaign, Bird never could have explained why she voted to overturn the cases of terrible murderers.

All that was a long time ago. Bird and her defenders warned that the campaign against her would forever politicize California courts. Certainly, the court has become more conservative. But partisan judicial campaigns that afflict other states are rare here.

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