A divided California Supreme Court on Thursday upheld a voter-passed initiative to speed up executions on death row, but ruled a five-year time limit to decide death penalty appeals isn’t mandatory.

Proposition 66, also called Death Penalty Reform and Savings Act of 2016, limits state appeals of death sentences to five years and transfers habeas petitions from the state Supreme Court back to the original trial court. The law passed with 51 percent of the vote this past November, narrowly beating out a rival measure to repeal the death penalty that received 46 percent of the vote.

…

But Justice Mariano-Florentino Cuéllar disagreed sharply, saying the five-year limit imposed by the statute was fully intended by voters to be a strict deadline, and to construe it otherwise throws the law into uncertainty.

“Candor requires us to be equally clear about whether such a deadline accords with our law: It does not,” he wrote. “A statutory limit on the amount of time a court may spend deciding a case is an intrusion on quintessential judicial functions and violates the California Constitution’s separation of powers provision. Only by misconstruing this mandatory five-year time limit as nothing more than an ‘exhortation’ for faster death penalty adjudication does the majority sidestep this outcome. In doing so, the majority disregards the electorate’s clear purpose in enacting Proposition 66 and fails to promote forthright deliberation.”

Cuellar added, “A mandatory deadline, as all the parties agree, is not constitutional. Because that is precisely what the voters enacted, we must be equally clear and invalidate it.”

Fourth Appellate District Justice Raymond Ikola joined Cuellar’s dissent.