DEATH-VERDICT APPEALS COMPOUND VILE CRIMES.

Byline: Bob Baker Local View

``JUSTICE delayed is justice denied.'' These words accurately describe the contemptible farce that California's death-penalty system has become.

The state's condemned inmates, fortunate to live in the jurisdiction of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, are far more likely to peaceably pass away from old age than to be executed for their horrendous crimes. Meanwhile, the families of the murdered are left to contemplate the backward ``morality'' of these criminals, with the knowledge that their loved ones were not given the opportunity granted to those on Death Row: the chance to appeal for their lives.

The ``game'' in the death-penalty appeal process, as played by defense attorneys and their co-conspirators, the judges, follows a familiar script: The trial judge was either inept or biased, the police corrupt or incompetent, and the jury negligent. Almost every argument in death-penalty appeals fits one of these categories.

The game then begins: Find some District Court judge or 9th Circuit justice to buy into your argument and either grant you a new trial or disregard a legitimate death-penalty verdict.

Precedent is beginning to make me think that the ``9'' in 9th Circuit stands for the 9-0 votes that the judges unanimously grant in favor of the criminals on Death Row.

Now we see this happening all over again. The script has been followed to a T by attorney Michael Snedeker.

Twenty years after an initial decision was handed down, Snedeker has invoked the hackneyed ``my client was framed'' and ``the cops were corrupt'' arguments in filing an appeal on behalf of his client, Daniel Jenkins, who is currently on Death Row for the first-degree murder with special circumstances of Los Angeles Police Department Detective Tom Williams in 1985.

Detective Williams was murdered, as his 6-year-old son watched, in retaliation for his testimony against Jenkins in a trial on armed robbery and assault.

Slandering without a shred of evidence the diligent police work of LAPD detectives, Snedeker seeks to keep convicted murderer Jenkins alive, once again demonstrating the selfishness and bizarre ``morality'' of Death Row inmates and their attorneys, who apparently believe the crime is more important than the punishment.

The sad fact that criminals' natural deaths more likely occur before their sentences are carried out is most tragically illustrated by the case of Theodore Frank, who was convicted of the brutal rape, torture and murder of 2-year-old Amy Sue Seitz in 1978. Kept alive by bogus appeals, Frank died of natural causes in 1991. His meritless appeals were still inching through the system.

Even when the final moments are at hand, the murderer can count on some anti-death-penalty member of the 9th Circuit - supported by a picket line of activists - to grant a last-minute stay. Who can forget the circus surrounding the execution of double murderer Robert Alton Harris as 9th Circuit judges repeatedly granted stays of execution at the last moments, only to have the stays lifted by the U.S. Supreme Court? The farce ended only when the Supreme Court was forced to take the unprecedented step of removing jurisdiction from the 9th Circuit, forbidding it to issue any more orders in the case.

Our judges are failing us. The defense lawyers who continue to manipulate our justice system for the sake of prolonging criminals' lives will always be with us. But we can influence who fills the judges' seats in the 9th Circuit, and we need to ensure that these judges are ruling according to the law, not going above it according to their own prejudices.

One can be sure that when this latest appeal in the case of Daniel Jenkins fails, his attorney will likely advance the latest death-penalty argument - that the execution is cruel and unusual because too many years have passed since the crime and conviction. To this argument, I respond: Was the same consideration given to Jenkins' victim, a loving husband and father of two young children?

So long as a majority of the judges of the 9th Circuit believe they can and should impose their personal opposition to the death penalty over the legislated wishes of the people of California, we can expect these outrageous miscarriages of justice to continue. This failure to administer justice also encourages the criminals of our state to treat the criminal-justice system with utter contempt. The punishment in these cases is death, and the integrity of our justice system will only deteriorate further if we continue to let these criminals live.