Cruz Reynoso
Cruz Reynoso was an American civil rights lawyer and jurist.
Reynoso was the first Chicano Associate Justice of the California Supreme Court, serving from 1982 to 1987. He also served on the California Third District Court of Appeal. In 1986, along with two other liberal members of the California Supreme Court—Chief Justice Rose Bird and Associate Justice Joseph Grodin—Reynoso became one of only three State Supreme Court justices ever recalled and removed by voters under California's judicial-retention election system. He served as vice-chairman of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights from 1993 to 2004.
After leaving the bench, Reynoso spent ten years on the faculty of the UCLA School of Law and five years at the UC Davis School of Law; he was professor emeritus. In 2000, Reynoso received the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the United States' highest civilian honor, for his efforts to address social inequities and his public service.
Early life and education
Reynoso was born in Brea, California on May 2, 1931. He grew up as one of 11 children, and from age eight worked as an agricultural worker in orange groves. His father was a farmworker.When Reynoso was seven, the family moved to a barrio outside of La Habra, California. While there, he attended the Wilson Grammar School, a racially segregated grade school for children of Mexican descent. His junior high school was integrated, as was Fullerton Union High School, from which he graduated.
The United States Postal Service refused to provide Rural Free Delivery service within the barrio, even though non-minority families living nearby received the service. Reynoso circulated a petition demanding service; the Postal Service responded to his petition and began providing mail delivery to the barrio. He also challenged the local school board about the Wilson School, after which the school was desegregated.
After high school, Reynoso attended Fullerton College, a community college, receiving an associate of arts degree in 1951. A dean from Pomona College offered him a scholarship if he applied and was admitted to that school. He received his Bachelor of Arts degree from Pomona College in 1953, after which he joined the U.S. Army, serving in the Counterintelligence Corps for two years. He was stationed in Washington, D.C., where his assignments included reviewing the House Un-American Activities Committee files on potential applicants for Federal jobs, a task he found distasteful. He received his Bachelor of Laws degree from the University of California, Berkeley, School of Law in 1958. Under a Ford Foundation fellowship, he studied constitutional law at the National University of Mexico in 1958–59.
Legal career
Reynoso began his career in private law practice in El Centro, California. He served as a legislative assistant in the California State Senate. He was an Associate General Counsel for the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission in 1967 and 1968.He then served as deputy director of California Rural Legal Assistance in 1968. Shortly thereafter, internal problems at CRLA led to his assuming the directorship; he was the first Latino to hold the position. His work with CRLA gained him national recognition. Reynoso recalled that, during his tenure, CRLA was "mentioned not infrequently as being the leading legal services program in the country." Then-Governor Ronald Reagan attempted to cut state funding for the CRLA during Reynoso's tenure, but the agency successfully resisted the challenge.
He was a professor of law at the University of New Mexico School of Law from 1972 to 1976.
Judicial career
In June 1976, Governor Jerry Brown appointed Reynoso to the California Court of Appeal as an associate justice. He was the first Latino appointed to the Court. In 1981, Governor Brown elevated Reynoso to the California Supreme Court, succeeding the retiring Mathew O. Tobriner. George Deukmejian, then the attorney general and on the commission on judicial appointments, voted against Reynoso's confirmation.In 1982, Reynoso was up for reconfirmation: under a measure adopted in 1934, California voters confirm a governor's appointments, and periodic unopposed elections are held for each justice during general elections, giving voters the opportunity to vote a justice out of office. Deukmejian, running as a Republican candidate for governor, urged voters to vote against justices Otto Kaus, Allen Broussard, and Reynoso; he hoped to replace them with conservative appointees, creating a new majority on the Court. The campaign labelled Kaus, Broussard, and Reynoso "Jerry's Judges". All three justices were retained; Reynoso received the lowest margin of victory, receiving the vote of only 52 percent of voters. A 1988 academic study of this election suggested that, although the retention election was theoretically nonpartisan and intended to retain justices based on their merit, partisan information is increasingly used by voters to structure their decisions in such elections.
Also during the 1980s, Reynoso was a member of the Congressional Select Commission on Immigrant and Refugee Policy. He was appointed by President Jimmy Carter.
As part of the court led by Chief Justice Rose Bird, Reynoso was a reliable part of the liberal majority. With that majority, he extended environmental protections, individual liberties, and civil rights.
When a case came before the Supreme Court regarding whether or not due process required that a non-English-speaking person charged with a crime be provided with an interpreter, Reynoso drew upon his experiences representing such clients to persuade a majority of his fellow justices that "basic fairness on the constitutional sense require that there be an interpreter for that individual".
In May 1985, Reynoso cautioned about the negative effects of politicizing judicial elections.
Removal from the Supreme Court
During the next retention vote in 1986, Bird, Joseph Grodin, and Reynoso were targeted by conservative and victims-rights groups. The 1986 campaign again portrayed the targeted justices as "soft on crime", but this time focused on the court's handling of the state's death penalty law. Reynoso believed Governor Deukmejian's decision to oppose him, Bird, and Grodin was the most important factor in that election. Deukmejian said that the justices' decisions on death-penalty cases demonstrated a "lack of impartiality and objectivity". Reynoso's advisors told him that it would take three campaign ads to counteract one ad by his opponents; he and the other justices lacked the funds to compete with the campaign, raising a collective $3 million to the opposition's $7 million. Deukmejian allegedly told Grodin and Reynoso that he would oppose their retention unless they voted to uphold more death sentences.The campaign highlighted that the Bird court had overturned 59 consecutive death-penalty cases during Bird's nine-year tenure. Reynoso, who had voted to uphold the state's death-penalty law, voted only once for a death sentence during his seven years on the court. The Oxnard Press-Courier said in an editorial that Reynoso was Bird's "most consistent ally" and that "he has been second only to the chief justice in supporting decisions that favor criminal defendants over prosecutors". The California District Attorneys Association issued a 78-page report attacking the three justices, mainly over their death-penalty rulings, but dropped their campaign later because of fears a political campaign could affect the group's tax-exempt status.
"There's clearly an effort to politicize the court", Reynoso told United Press International during the campaign. He was endorsed by the California Organization of Police and Sheriffs. According to California attorney general John Van de Kamp, the court refused to hear appeals of, or affirmed, 97 percent of convictions in the 1984/85 fiscal year; Reynoso remarked, "That doesn't sound at all like a 'soft on crime' record". Defending his death-penalty votes, he said that "most, but not all" of the reversals stemmed from the 1978 Briggs Amendment, which "does not comport with U.S. Supreme Court law".
The campaign to remove the justices succeeded; voters rejected new terms for Bird, Grodin, and Reynoso. Reynoso was rejected by 60 percent of voters. This made Deukmejian the first governor in California history to have the opportunity to appoint three justices to the court at once. The justices left the bench when the court's term ended on January 5, 1987.
Afterward, Donald Heller, a former Federal prosecutor who drafted the 1978 death-penalty initiative approved by California voters, disagreed with the campaign to unseat the justices, calling Reynoso "a thoughtful, decent man who got thrown out" and "a very capable judge who tried to do the right thing in cases." Reynoso said of the result, "you can't blame when the governor of the state, who is a lawyer, says the justices aren't following the law. If I didn't know better, I would have voted against me, too."
Impact of the removal campaign
The 1986 California Supreme Court retention election started a major trend turning such elections into "an ideological battleground over judicial philosophies and specific decisions", making them "as highly salient as races for overtly political offices", wrote one academic paper. Even before the election, California Supreme Court Justice Otto Kaus remarked "You cannot forget the fact that you have a crocodile in your bathtub", referring to the act of making a judicial decision without regard to the potential political consequences. "You know it's there, and you try not to think about it, but it's hard to think about much else while you're shaving." "You keep wondering whether you're letting yourself be influenced, and you do not know. You do not know yourself that well," he wrote. "You worry about it in two different ways," wrote Reynoso; "First you worry it might influence you improperly. Then you worry because you're concerned you might overcompensate, and not pay enough attention to arguments that are perfectly legitimate."Erwin Chemerinsky, a law professor from the University of Southern California, agreed with the ousted Justice Grodin, saying "the legacy of 1986 could be that justices facing retention elections will decide cases with an eye, perhaps subconsciously, on how their rulings will affect their chances at the polls." Chemerinsky called for abolishing judicial-review elections. He wrote, "Largely due to defects in a poorly worded death penalty law, the court had a strikingly one-sided pattern of decisions on the issue", noting that this, Bird's controversial history, the trio's appointments by an unpopular governor, and the realization by their opponents that the court's ideology could be completely changed if the campaign succeeded led to the opposition campaign. Jazon Czarnezki, assistant professor of law at Marquette University, attributed Bird's defeat to "her resolute opposition to the death penalty and overturning a series of death sentences". Exit polls indicated that the death-penalty issue was the major reason why voters refused to retain the justices.
The justices were also impacted by a lack of support from Democratic legislative incumbents in safe districts.
Despite the fact that California Supreme Court justices undergoing a retention election are running uncontested, the median spending for justices' campaigns rose from $3,177 in 1976 to $70,000 in 1994.
Campaigns similar to the one expelling Bird, Grodin, and Reynoso have since been mounted against judges in other states, such as Justice Penny J. White of Tennessee, who also lost a retention election due to a death-penalty issue. Retired California Supreme Court Chief Justice Ronald George advocated eliminating retention elections and appointing justices to single 15-year terms, following an election in Iowa where three justices were removed from office after that state's high court overturned a ban on same-sex marriage. The campaign was largely funded by out-of-state organizations; George said that the January 2010 United States Supreme Court ruling allowing corporations and unions to contribute unlimited sums to independent political committees was likely to increase the influence of well-funded groups in nonpartisan judicial retention elections like those in Iowa and California.