Although Janice Brown, Governor Wilson's nominee to the California Supreme Court, has little experience as a judge, at least one case leaves little doubt as to how she will rule on prison cases. In a dissenting opinion, she argued that prison officials should be free to ignore their own rules if need be: "The CDC runs prisons, not country clubs, not vocational schools."

In In re Yakle, the majority of the court of appeal found that the Department of Corrections was bound by their rules. They could change the rules, but they must follow them as written. Thus, if a regulation stated that wardens "will" establish a handicraft program, an institution was under a mandatory duty. The majority found the state's argument -- that "will" was not mandatory -- "wholly unpersuasive." A concurring opinion chided the Director of Corrections for asking the court to take a judicial activist stance and "clean up his bacon."

Justice Brown had no problems in this role. She wrote that courts should not interfere with prison officials. Her dissent failed to even consider whether officials needed to comply with their rules. It does not speak well of future decisions she may make as a high court justice.

We will say, however, that our preliminary research has shown that Justice Brown has voted to reverse three California death penalty verdicts--one in a case where the defendant was denied the right to represent himself and another, in which she authored the opinion, involving the prosecutor's withholding of exculpatory evidence in a crime lab report. In the third case, the prosecutor "lied to the jury about the evidence and laughed and made faces when the defense lawyer spoke."