PENALTY

ecause he or she is tried in an area of the county that is less likely or
more likely to return a verdict of death? This concern holds for the
entire state: Why should defendants benefit or suffer simply because
of their county’s policy regarding the death penalty or the propensity
of jurors in the county to favour or oppose it?
I spent 32 years in the Los Angeles County District Attorney’s office,
including eight years as the elected District Attorney and four in
the second-highest position, Chief Deputy District Attorney. In those
capacities I oversaw the final decision-making process regarding the
death penalty. In my eight years as District Attorney, I supported and
implemented California’s death penalty law. I left office at the end
of 2000. About 10 years later, I reversed my position on the death
penalty. I became convinced that it serves no useful criminal justice
or societal purpose, including as a deterrent to murder; that given
the number of recently exonerated death row inmates throughout
the United States, there were undoubtedly people on California’s
death row who should not be there; that the obscene amount of
taxpayers’ money used to support the death penalty would be much
more effectively used to keep teachers, school counsellors, and law
enforcement personnel on the job; and that the current system, under
which death-penalty cases often last for decades, was not fair to the
families and loved ones of murder victims.
In 2011 I made my views public. My ultimate goal is to see the death
penalty repealed, in California as well as the entire United States, and
replaced with life in prison without the possibility of parole. Each
state has a slightly different means of achieving this goal. Some, like
California and Oregon, require a voter initiative, 2 while others may
repeal through the state legislature. No matter the method, repeal
is a difficult task, because the death penalty in the United States is
a highly emotional issue, deeply political, and misunderstood by a
majority of Americans.
2 In a voter initiative, proponents of a measure circulate a petition which, if it garners enough
signatures, enables the measure to be placed on a ballot in the next election, to be voted on
directly by citizens. California and 17 other states provide for state laws to be passed in this way.
THE CALIFORNIA MORATORIUM
The hard facts behind the death penalty process have begun to come
to light in the United States, giving some of our political leaders,
including vocal supporters of the death penalty, a reason to pause
and think critically about the system. Many have publicly supported
a moratorium in order to allow time for a meaningful conversation
on the issue. California has since 2006 had a de facto moratorium
on executions due to ongoing legal challenges to the state’s lethal
injection protocol. This has created an environment that has allowed
us to move closer to achieving our goal of replacing the death penalty
with life in prison without the possibility of parole.
California’s de facto moratorium, as well as the moratoriums imposed
by the governors of the states of Oregon, Washington and Colorado,
have undoubtedly created an environment in which full repeal is
more plausible. The positive effect of moratoriums can be seen most
clearly in New Jersey, where a moratorium on executions was put in
place in 2004 due to the lack of a proper lethal injection procedure.
In the following years, questions about the effectiveness of the death
penalty as a deterrent, cost feasibility, and, critically, the risk of sentencing
innocents to death led New Jersey to repeal its death penalty
in 2007. The de facto moratorium in California has similarly created
an environment of scrutiny.
To fully understand the de facto moratorium in California, it is helpful
to go back a few decades. After several years without a death
penalty, California voters reinstated it in 1978 in an initiative process.
Not many years after reinstatement, both supporters and opponents
of the death penalty became very unhappy with the how it was
being administered. In 2004, the California State Senate established
the California Commission on the Fair Administration of Justice,
a bipartisan blue-ribbon panel tasked with speeding up the death
penalty process, investigating the causes of wrongful convictions and
executions in the state, and recommending reforms. The resulting
report made substantive recommendations for change. Even though
highly respected individuals on both sides of the argument urged
the legislature to adopt major changes in the administration of the
death penalty, no meaningful change was adopted by the legislature.
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