
SACRAMENTO, CA – Those convicted of murder and sentenced to death in Santa Clara County over the past 50 years do not inspire sympathy, as seen through the examples of Richard Farley and Mark Crew, wrote the Sacramento Bee last week.
The Bee added Santa Clara County has lost millions of dollars in fighting appeals against death sentences that convicted murderers are entitled to under the law, noting there have been no executions in California since 2006.
Santa Clara District Attorney Jeff Rosen, as stated in the Bee, doubted “the morality of sentencing people to death in a system” that penalizes them harsher depending on the race of the victim and perpetrator, and in which four percent of convictions are said to be flawed.”
But, Rosen is pretty much alone among DAs willing to commute sentences, the Bee wrote.
Rosen’s doubts about the system is the reason why he will ask for Farley’s sentence to be commuted to life in prison without the possibility of parole in March, which is the latest in more than a dozen such cases that he has successfully fought.
Rosen, quoted by the Sacramento Bee, said, “I’m trying to end, for my county, the resources that we’re spending every day, every week on litigation in these cases, and then being able to have those resources spent investigating and prosecuting rapes, murders, burglaries and holding those offenders accountable.”
According to the Sacramento Bee, this change is unlikely to happen in Sacramento, since District Attorney Thien Ho stated he would consider commuting sentences for inmates believed to be innocent, but he continues to seek capital punishment in some cases.
Meanwhile, in Yolo County, the Sacramento Bee states that District Attorney Jeff Reisig “said he would never undertake a move like Rosen’s.”
The Sacramento Bee introduces Austin Sarat, a political scientist who opposes the death penalty and has studied the issue at Amherst College in Massachusetts. According to Sarat, these three approaches by different prosecutors illustrate the political climate that surrounds the death penalty in California and elsewhere.
In Sarat’s view, as noted in the Sacramento Bee, all three prosecutors are acting at a time when public opinion surrounding the death penalty, and appropriate sentences for other crimes, is changing. Sarat claims that as a society, many disagree about whether or not the death penalty should be used, and how and when to impose it.
The Bee quoted Sarat: “We are in a period of national reconsideration of capital punishment…a variation in the way in which people, prosecutors, governors, legislators, respond to the situation of the death penalty in the United States.”
The Sacramento Bee asks if Gov. Gavin Newsom could follow in Biden’s footsteps, when Biden commuted the sentences of all but three federal death row inmates last month. Newsom said he was considering a similar move for California’s inmates but did not indicate that such an action would happen soon. Newsom imposed a moratorium in 2019.
Sarat claims in the Bee that U.S. juries sentenced as many as 300 people to death per year in the late 1990s. This number dropped to around 25 last year. Drawing from state data, the Sacramento Bee stated that only three people were sentenced to death in 2023, down from the 41 people sentenced in 1996.
Again drawing from state data, the Sacramento Bee emphasizes how two dozen men are under death sentences sought by Sacramento County prosecutors, with another two tried in Yolo County. The oldest such case is from 1981 when Joe Edward Johnson, now 74, was sentenced to death by a Sacramento jury.
The Sacramento Bee refers to a statement from the office of District Attorney Ho, in which he indicated his unlikeliness to deviate from the existing process of considering and imposing the death penalty, citing checks and balances in the judicial system.
According to the Sacramento Bee, Ho is currently seeking capital punishment for Adel Ramos, who pled guilty to the shootout that took the life of 26-year-old Sacramento police rookie Tara O’Sullivan.
The statement from Ho’s office is quoted in the Sacramento Bee noting, “The decision to seek a death sentence is never taken lightly,” and “once imposed, death sentences are then automatically appealed. Any decision to alter from this path would require compelling circumstances.”
In the case there was credible evidence indicating an inmate’s innocence, Ho told the Sacramento Bee that “we would not hesitate to revisit the issue.”
The Sacramento Bee describes District Attorney Reisig from Yolo County as one of the first prosecutors in the state who moved to reduce terms for people serving time for offenses that would not be treated as harshly today. However, according to the Bee, Reisig said commuting death penalties was “going too far” and he “would never consider doing that.”
Reisig said to the Bee, “California voters have rejected ballot initiatives that would have eliminated the death penalty twice, and thus it is an acceptable manner of punishment for the worst crimes. The voters have been pretty unequivocal in California on the issue…that is the root of my view on why I would never consider it.”
According to the Sacramento Bee, none of the three district attorneys mentioned had calculated the cost of pursuing the death penalty and handling appeals at the county level.
However, Rosen is said to have cited studies that claimed each such case cost at least $1 million, and according to an analysis by the Sacramento Bee, the legal costs for death penalty cases in California was around $72 million per year.
The Sacramento Bee also emphasizes how only 36 lawyers in the state were qualified to handle certain state-level appeals, which meant that inmates often had to wait 30 or more years simply to obtain legal counsel—more than 360 inmates do not have an attorney to handle these habeas corpus appeals, and around 125 of them have been waiting for over 20 years.