EDITORIAL\A mockery of justice\Legal delays frustrate California's death-penalty law.

IT didn't take long for the wheels of justice to turn after William Kirkpatrick Jr. decided at the last moment that he didn't want to be executed for murdering two employees of a Burbank fast-food restaurant in 1983.

Kirkpatrick, who pleaded for an execution date in a letter to the United States Supreme Court last year, filed an appeal in federal court. On Friday, a federal judge granted Kirkpatrick a stay of execution. It's quite likely that this new round of appeals will keep Kirkpatrick, 35, alive for at least four more years - or maybe even until he meets his maker due to natural causes.

This kind of appeal is all to common and it helps explain why those law enforcement cynically joke that no one (or hardly anyone) dies on death row. There have been only two executions in California since the U.S. Supreme Court lifted a ban on the use of the death penalty in 1976.

Meanwhile, as of last Friday, the population on death row was 432 - and growing.

Some of the inmates have been there for years. The last person to be executed in California, David Mason, went to the gas chamber in 1993, only after abandoning his appeals. Eleven years passed between the date of his conviction and his execution.

There's no secret as to why so many death row inmates win stays of executions. Plenty of lawyers are willing to take to their cases, and federal judges in the 9th circuit are more willing than their counterparts elsewhere to drag out the process.

Meanwhile, the automatic appeal process under California's death-penalty law is bogged down because 125 inmates don't have attorneys.

That means, barring a breakthrough on the legal-representation front, there will be even more delays in enforcing the death-penalty law.

It's such miscarriages that cause citizens to lose faith in their government and in the democratic process.

It also helps explain why efforts are under way in Congress to limit the power of federal courts to overturn death-penalty decisions made by state courts.

Congress would be taking a drastic - and appropriate - step if it limited appeals in capital cases. And we suspect that the popularity of such legislation surely will grow so long as voters watch cases like Kirkpatrick's drag on in a legal system that, at least in some places, appears to hold the will of the people in contempt.