Last week State Senator Loni Hancock introduced legislation to replace the death penalty in California with permanent imprisonment, and to convert death penalty sentences to life imprisonment with no possibility of parole.
The legislation would require both the Governor’s signature and approval by the voters for a Legislative-sponsored initiative that would be put on the November 2012 ballot.
“Capital punishment is an expensive failure and an example of the dysfunction of our prisons,” Senator Hancock stated. “California’s death row is the largest and most costly in the United States. It is not helping to protect our state; it is helping to bankrupt us.”
Big deal you say? The push to end the death penalty based on the cost and lack of use in California has been gaining steam for some time. In fact, some polls show that a majority of voters support ending the death penalty in California if life without parole is the alternative.
The Los Angeles Times reported last week on a new study that highlights the exorbitant cost of maintaining the death penalty. The study projects that the cost of maintaining the death penalty will rise to $9 billion by 2030. The study reports that taxpayers have already spent more than $4 billion on only 13 executions since the death penalty was reinstated in 1978.
Death penalty opponents in California strategized that perhaps the access point to this issue was more economic than moral for many in California. If this morning’s column is any indication, they have won one adherent venerable columnist Dan Walters, a fiscal conservative who writes on California.
This morning he called Governor Brown’s cancelation of construction on a $400 million expansion of death row at San Quentin, “a small victory for common sense.”
He writes, “While California has hundreds of men and a few women awaiting execution for murder, reality is that few, if any, will actually be put to death, given the immense legal and operational impediments.” And continues: “But maintaining the fiction that California has a death penalty for heinous crimes is very expensive when state and local governments face yawning deficits and are slashing basic educational, social and public safety services.”
The report referred to, “Executing the Will of the Voters: A Roadmap to Mend or End the California Legislature’s Multi-Billion-Dollar Death Penalty Debacle,” was written by U.S. 9th Circuit Judge Arthur L. Alarcon, a former prosecutor, and Loyola Law School professor Paula M. Mitchell.
As we reported last week, California spends about $184 million each year on the death penalty alone. That may not sound like a tremendous amount in a state with budget deficits in the tens of billions, but put it this way: Taxpayers have spent more than $4 billion on capital punishment in California since 1978 when the death penalty was reinstated. Over that time, they have executed 13 people. That means that there was about $308 million spent on each executed prisoner.
Judge Alarcon told the LA Times that he believes “the majority of California voters will want to retain some option for punishing the worst criminals with death.”
It was Judge Alarcon who, in 2007, issued “an urgent appeal for overhaul of capital punishment in the state, noting that the average lag between conviction and execution was more than 17 years, twice the national figure. Now it is more than 25 years, with no executions since 2006 and none likely in the near future because of legal challenges to the state’s lethal injection procedures.”
The LA Times adds, “Unless profound reforms are made by lawmakers who have failed to adopt previous recommendations for rescuing the system, Alarcon and Mitchell say, capital punishment will continue to exist mostly in theory while exacting an untenable cost.”
Their findings are to be published this week in the Loyola of Los Angeles Law Review.
Dan Walters writes that other studies have come up with different numbers, “but not very different, and whatever the cost, it’s too much.”
He writes, “The extra millions being spent to feed, clothe, house and guard death row inmates would be better spent on much-needed reform of the entire prison system, which has a terrible recidivism problem, has dismantled substance abuse and education programs, and is under federal court order to reduce severe overcrowding.”
Indeed, he argues that some still believe that the death penalty is a deterrent to crime, but he argues, “If that’s true, it’s only if capital punishment is certain and swift. If condemned felons are more likely to succumb to disease and/or old age than a trip to the execution chamber, whatever deterrent value it may have is reduced to abstract symbolism.”
He argues, therefore, that “it has become meaningless, since only a relative handful of those who kill are themselves condemned, and virtually no one who receives the sentence actually will take the long walk.”
Thus he concludes, “It’s time to grow up, accept reality and adjust to it, and that should mean doing away with the fiction of capital punishment and substituting the reality of life imprisonment.”
Judge Alarcon and Professor Mitchell came up with three options. First, we can fully preserve capital punishment with an estimated $85 million per year in funding for courts and attorneys. Second, there can be a reduction in the number of death penalty-eligible crimes. This would save about $55 million per year. Finally, we could abolish capital punishment which would save about $1 billion every five or six years.
Senator Hancock comes forth with option three.
According to Senator Hancock, “Study after study has shown that capital punishment as a penalty is not a deterrent and that the multiple appeals that drag on for years and years multiply costs and add to the uncertainty and anxiety of victims. The death penalty failings cannot be fixed; it must be repealed. Distinguished prosecutors such as Los Angeles County’s long-time DA Gil Garcetti have come out against it. It is time for the Legislature to act.”
Senator Hancock added, “It is not simply a cost issue. More than a dozen people were wrongly executed in Illinois before that state banned the death penalty earlier this year. I don’t want to see that kind of tragic statistic in California. We need to join Illinois and the 15 other states that have chosen to substitute life imprisonment without the possibility of parole for a failed death penalty.”
“Today we’re not tough on crime; we’re tough on the taxpayer. Every time we spend money on failed policies like the death penalty, we drain money from having more police officers on the street, more job training, more education, more of the things that would truly make for safer communities,” the Senator said.
To which Dan Walters responds, “She is absolutely correct.”
When Dan Walters is pushing for the end of the death penalty in California, you know its time has come.
—David M. Greenwald reporting
Frankly, I don’t think money is the issue here, as much as it is the danger of convicting the innocent. There will be no huge financial gains from doing away with capital punishment. That said, I would like to see those funds saved by doing away with capital punishment put towards treatment programs, but my guess is the state will suck that money up for other things, and there will be no infusion of money for treatment programs… call me a cynic…
[b]”More than a dozen people were wrongly executed in Illinois before that state banned the death penalty earlier this year.”[/b]
This is news to me. Twelve or more people who were later proven innocent were executed in Illinois? According to this chart ([url]http://www.deathpenaltyinfo.org/number-executions-state-and-region-1976[/url]), since 1976 Illinois has executed just 12 people total.
I Googled the topic and found one suspect case from Illinois: Girvies Davis ([url]http://www.lairdcarlson.com/grip/Davis Case Summary.htm[/url]). He was executed in 1995. (That was the big execution year in Illinois, when they had 5 death sentences carried out.)
Davis’s defenders say he was “innocent” in large part because it is evident he was the victim of a false, coerced confession. He was an illiterate who signed a statement he could not read (and was not read to him) which said he committed a long list of murders, some of which he could not have possibly committed.
It didn’t appear from the summary of the case by Laird Carlson that there was an exculpatory evidence to show he did not kill Charles Biebel, the victim whose case sent Davis to death row, or that Davis was not a part of the killing. (There was another man who may have fired the gun.) What is clear is that under Illinois law, even if he was guilty of the murder in question, he probably [i]would not have qualified[/i] for a death sentence if the police and prosecutors had been faithful to the law in his case. That’s not quite the same thing as calling Mr. Davis “innocent.” It is a part of a long list of evidence that the judicial system in Illinois was flawed, and that many of the actors for the people were themselves guilty of dubious or illegal conduct in their efforts to win convictions.