Death Penalty Focus

California has a long and notorious history of sentencing convicted felons to death and spending hundreds of millions of dollars per execution. While California has executed only 13 inmates since the reinstatement of the death penalty in 1976, the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation currently boasts the largest death row in the United States, with 666 condemned inmates. This number is far more than the next two closest states, Florida and Texas, which each have between 300 and 400 condemned prisoners currently on death row.

In California, local politics, quality of legal counsel and the jurisdiction where a crime is committed are more often the determining factors in a death penalty case than the facts of the crime itself.

A 2005 Los Angeles Times article found that the California death penalty system costs taxpayers more than $114 million a year beyond the cost of simply keeping inmates locked up for life. This figure does not include additional unreported court costs related to post-conviction hearings in both state and federal courts, charges that are estimated to exceed several million dollars. It costs $90,000 more to house a prisoner on death row, than it costs to house him in the general prison population. With 13 inmates executed since 1976, California’s modern death penalty statute has come in with a bill of over $200 million dollars per execution.

Get Involved: Californians need to act soon to restore justice and economic sanity to the criminal defense system in California. If you live in California:

1. Contact your local legislators and urge them to support bills aimed at reducing wrongful convictions. Three bills have been introduced to implement the California Commission on the Fair Administration of Justice’s recommended reforms:

• Senate Bill 511 (Alquist) will require the electronic recording of police interrogation in cases involving homicides and other serious felonies.
• Senate Bill 756 (Ridley-Thomas) will require the appointment of a task force to draft guidelines for the conduct of police line-ups and photo arrays to increase the accuracy of eyewitness identifications.
• Senate Bill 609 (Romero) will require the corroboration of testimony by jailhouse informants.

2. Contact governors, legislators, and state and federal leaders to voice your concerns about pending executions, and to urge them to support a federal moratorium on executions.

3. Write a letter to the editor of your local newspaper expressing your support for abolition of the death penalty.

Innocence

There have been numerous egregious miscarriages of justice in California. At least six men have been sentenced to death who were either acquitted on the charge of murder or had their murder convictions overturned. In addition, scores of other inmates in non-capital crimes have had their convictions overturned in recent years by DNA evidence and other new information. The testimony of jailhouse informants, evidence of prosecutorial misconduct, shockingly inadequate defense counsel, and bad police work have consistently been factors in capital convictions. Several specific cases of overturned convictions are available at: http://deathpenalty.org/index.php?pid=Innocence&menu=1

Geographic Inequality

The political climate and the attitude of the district attorney in different jurisdictions have made the application of the death penalty geographically disparate. While some district attorneys aggressively seek the death penalty in a majority of eligible cases, many other jurisdictions rarely, if ever, condemn a convicted felon to death. For example, hundreds of inmates from Los Angeles County are currently on death row in San Quentin while only one man from San Francisco County is incarcerated on death row. 20 of California’s 58 counties haven’t sent anyone to death row.

Racial Biases

Racial biases with regards to the ethnicity of both the victim have been shown statistically to have a direct correlation to the decision to seek the death penalty. Specifically, Glenn Pierce and Michael Radelet reported in a December 2005 article published in the Santa Clara Law Review that:

• 80% of executions in California were for those convicted of killing whites, while only 27.6% of murder victims are white.
• Those who murder whites are over four times more likely to be sentenced to death than those who kill Latinos and over three times more likely to be sentenced to death than those who kill African-Americans.
• A person convicted of 1st degree murder in a predominantly white, rural county (like Napa, King, Colusa, or Shasta counties) is more than three times as likely to be sentenced to death than a person convicted of a similar crime in a diverse, urban county like Los Angeles, which has the highest number of homicides in the state.
• The death rate by homicide in California varies substantially by race. African- Americans are six times more likely to be murdered than whites.