"States push to end the death penalty," is the title of Mackenzie Weinger's report at Politico. It looks at activity in several states. Here's the beginning, with a focus on California:
Could capital punishment be at death’s door in 2012?
That’s the goal for several states next year, say leading anti-death penalty advocates who are making a push to end the controversial practice.
In California, supporters of abolishing the death penalty have gathered hundreds of thousands of signatures to place a measure on the November ballot, while activists and lawmakers in Maryland, Kansas, Ohio and Connecticut are gearing up for legislative battles in their states.
Advocates say the coming year could be their best opportunity yet to replace the death penalty with life without the possibility of parole in these states, pointing to shifts in public opinion, rising concern over execution costs, Oregon Gov. John Kitzhaber’s recent decision to place a moratorium on capital punishment, and Troy Davis’s high-profile execution galvanizing opposition to the death penalty. And in California, the drive for a public referendum could get a boost by appearing on the presidential election-year ballot, backers say.
Davis’s controversial case, which spurred protests in Georgia and around the country, was a wake-up call for many Americans, said Diann Rust-Tierney, the National Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty’s executive director. “That was a sad but stark example to folks of how broken the system is,” Rust-Tierney told POLITICO.
It’s a system that’s not just broken, anti-death penalty activists say, but far too costly.
In California — where capital punishment was passed by the voters over 30 years ago and can only be repealed by referendum — the state’s painful budgetary crisis spells a great opportunity for success in 2012, according to those pushing the measure.
Natasha Minsker of the SAFE California Campaign, the group leading the effort to qualify a measure for the state’s November ballot replacing the death penalty with life without possibility of parole, said a recent study that found California has spent roughly $4 billion to carry out 13 executions since the death penalty was reinstated in 1978 has fired up the repeal effort in a state plagued by terrible financial problems. The staggering $4 billion figure comes from all costs funding the death penalty system in California, including the trials, appeals, death-row housing, healthcare of inmates and the executions themselves.
“More voters now realize that the death penalty is enormously expensive, and we’re in the worst budget crisis ever in California history,” Minsker told POLITICO. “With the economic crisis right now — that Californians are living everyday with terrible budget cuts — people are much more likely to pay attention to the fact that we are wasting money on the death penalty.”
The campaign has collected 240,000 signatures — California requires 504,000 valid signatures for the referendum to make it onto the ballot — and is aiming to submit about 750,000 by the end of February. And, Minsker added, they’ve already got $1.2 million in their coffers from contributions that ranged in size from $5 to $500,000.
Related posts are in the abolition index.
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