522
Stevens, J., dissenting
importance and prevalence surely justify careful review when those measures change the consequences of past conduct.
The danger of legislative overreaching against which the Ex Post Facto Clause protects is particularly acute when the target of the legislation is a narrow group as unpopular (to put it mildly) as multiple murderers. There is obviously little legislative hay to be made in cultivating the multiple murderer vote. For a statute such as the 1981 amendment, therefore, the concerns that animate the Ex Post Facto Clause demand enhanced, and not (as the majority seems to believe) reduced, judicial scrutiny.7
III
The second feature of the 1981 amendment on which the majority relies is the provision requiring that the Board make certain findings before it may defer the annual hearings. At the time of respondent's crime, the Board was instructed either to set a parole date at an inmate's initial parole hearing or, if it set no date, to provide the inmate with a written statement explaining the reasons for the denial and suggesting "activities in which he might participate that will benefit him while he is incarcerated." The statute provided that the Board "shall hear each case annually thereafter." Cal. Penal Code Ann. § 3041.5(b)(2) (West 1982).
The 1981 amendment allows the Board to defer the annual hearings for multiple murderers for up to three years if "the [B]oard finds that it is not reasonable to expect that parole
7 Though the Court suggests that "multiple murderers" have a particularly low likelihood of parole, ante, at 510-511, n. 7, the statute in effect at the time of respondent's offense determined that even multiple murderers were sufficiently likely candidates for early release to be entitled to an annual parole hearing. The grant of that statutory right reflected the California Legislature's judgment that such a hearing provided an important avenue to reduced punishment. The Ex Post Facto Clause, properly construed, should prevent the legislature from revising that judgment retroactively.
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