Respondent was sentenced to 15 years to life for the 1980 murder of his wife and became eligible for parole in 1990. As required by California law, the Board of Prison Terms (Board) held a hearing in 1989, at which time it found respondent unsuitable for parole for numerous reasons, including the fact that he had committed his crime while on parole for an earlier murder. Respondent would have been entitled to subsequent suitability hearings annually under the law in place when he murdered his wife. The law was amended in 1981, however, to allow the Board to defer subsequent hearings for up to three years for a prisoner convicted of more than one offense involving the taking of a life, if the Board finds that it is not reasonable to expect that parole would be granted at a hearing during the intervening years and states the bases for the finding. Pursuant to this amendment, the Board scheduled respondents next hearing for 1992. He then filed a federal habeas corpus petition, asserting that as applied to him, the 1981 amendment c