The state and federal constitutions provide for a separation of powers among the executive, legislative and judicial branches of government. The three have separate and distinct functions and they "check and balance" one another. It's a good system that has worked pretty well for more than 200 years.

But Utah Attorney General Mark Shurtleff believes he has a better idea.

Shurtleff -- of the executive branch -- wants to give the Legislature -- the legislative branch -- power to dictate to Utah courts -- the judicial branch -- how they should do their jobs, in a wrongheaded and unconstitutional power grab he's disguising as a way to expedite executions.

Senate Joint Resolution 14 is a constitutional amendment that would tie the hands of judges in all appeals, but, most egregiously, death-penalty appeals. It states that "a person may challenge the legality of the conviction or sentence only in the manner and to the extent provided by statute."

That would, in effect, take life-or-death legal decisions out of the jurisdiction of the courts, where the Constitution assigned them, and put them in the hands of lawmakers, most of whom know little about criminal law and nothing about the merits of any individual case. The proposal is outrageous, and Shurtleff knows it.

He also knows, or should know, that defendants in capital murder cases in Utah already face a system stacked against them. Most of them have to rely on the state for their defense, and Utah public defenders qualified to handle death-penalty cases are underpaid and overworked. If Shurtleff's amendment were to pass, these defendants likely would have little chance to have their convictions reviewed based on an inadequate defense. So if a public defender fails to present all possible arguments, or simply can't devote the necessary time to a particular case, the court would face barriers to correcting the error.

The goal of our justice system is not to get a person from the courtroom to the execution chamber as quickly as possible, as Shurtleff says, but to provide justice. And that means giving all defendants ample chance for a fair appeal, as well as a chance for their attorneys to ferret out mistakes that sometimes require a do-over, a delay in carrying out a sentence or even the setting aside of a conviction. And that's the job of judges, not legislators.

There's no doubt our system for challenging verdicts in capital cases is agonizingly slow. That may be, in part, because the death penalty is inherently immoral, discriminatory and fallible. The best answer would be to abolish it. Short of that, let's not corrupt the system further by getting the legislative branch involved.