PENALTY

victims’ families, it is imposed discriminately at a huge cost to the
state, and, most importantly, it risks executing innocent people.
The complicated and often decades-long appeals process that death
row inmates are constitutionally entitled to in California and other
states does not achieve swift justice for victims’ families. Most appeals
provide many opportunities for reversal and do not give families any
kind of closure. Furthermore, the lengthy appeals process and special
incarceration of death row inmates comes at a huge cost to the
state. The death penalty costs 10 times as much as life in prison. If
California replaced the death penalty with life in prison without the
possibility of parole, the state would save $1 billion in just five years.
In the midst of a severe ongoing budget crisis, a legitimate question
is whether we should be investing taxpayer money in a broken death
penalty that serves no worthy criminal-justice or societal purpose—
or in education, mental health and law enforcement.
The death penalty in the United States has also been shown to fall
disproportionately on people of colour and people of limited means.
For example, data from 2011 show that someone whose victim is
white is three times more likely to be sentenced to death than someone
whose victim is African American, and four times more likely
than someone whose victim is Latino. While only 27.6 per cent of
murder victims are white, 80 per cent of prisoners executed in California
have been convicted of killing whites. The location at which a
murder occurs also affects the likelihood of the offender receiving the
death penalty. In California, someone convicted in Alameda County,
for example, is eight times more likely to be sentenced to death than
someone convicted in Santa Clara County. As discussed earlier, even
within the single (though large and diverse) County of Los Angeles,
the death penalty is applied unequally in different locations. These
stark disparities are evidence that the death penalty is being imposed
discriminately, a reality that undermines a basic goal of our criminal
justice system—fair and equal treatment under the law.
Finally, the death penalty comes with the unacceptable and ever-present
risk of executing innocents. Between 1973 and 2011, 138 people
were exonerated and released from death rows across the United
States. Nationally, one person is exonerated for every 10 that are
executed. The factors that commonly lead to wrongful convictions
are rampant and varied: eyewitness error, false confessions, false testimony
by an informant, prosecutorial misconduct and poor forensic
evidence. The risk of wrongful conviction and execution can never
be removed from a death penalty system.
In November 2012, California voters had the opportunity to replace
the death penalty with life in prison without the possibility of parole
through a voter initiative known as Proposition 34. While that proposition
lost, the trend in public opinion had clearly changed. In 1978,
Californians had voted overwhelmingly (70 per cent to 30 per cent)
to reinstate the death penalty. But in 2012, 48 per cent of Californians
voted in favour of repeal while 52 per cent voted against it (5,974,000
to 6,460,000). If about 250,000 voters had had been convinced to
change their votes, there would be no death penalty in California
today. The initiative failed in good part because the campaign did not
reach enough voters with information. The reality of the California
political system is that winning a ballot initiative, especially on a
controversial issue like the death penalty, requires millions of dollars
for voter education; unfortunately, the repeal campaign did not have
sufficient resources.
Since Prop 34’s defeat in 2012, California’s death penalty repeal advocates
are continuing to educate the public about the high costs of the
death penalty; reshaping the California Coalition behind Proposition
34 into an ongoing advocacy campaign to promote public safety policies
that reflect our shared values of safety, accountability, fairness and
equality; and strengthening alliances with law enforcement, victims
and labour as well as traditional supporters in the faith and civil rights
communities. The ultimate goal, replacing the death penalty with life
in prison without the possibility of parole, will best serve our priorities:
to protect law-abiding citizens and punish those who commit
society’s most heinous crimes.
FEDERAL DEATH PENALTY CASES
The vast majority of death penalty cases are handled in the state
courts. According to the Federal Death Penalty Resource Project,
federal prosecutors tried 190 death penalty cases, involving 281
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