"Yes on the SAFE California Act: It would replace the death penalty with a sentence of life without parole, and solve a host of problems bedeviling the state law enforcement system," is the editorial in today's Los Angeles Times.
Carlos DeLuna was, in all likelihood, murdered by the state of Texas on Dec. 7, 1989.
It's hard to come to any other conclusion after reading an exhaustive analysis of his case published online by a Columbia law school professor and his students. And he may not be the only innocent death row inmate executed by that notably bloodthirsty state. Cameron Todd Willingham, a man whose conviction for setting a fire that killed his three young daughters was based on spectacularly shoddy forensics work, was injected with a death cocktail on Feb. 17, 2004.
This should never happen in California. In November, voters will have a chance to ensure that it doesn't.
Ordinarily, this page doesn't endorse ballot initiatives until shortly before an election, but the SAFE California Act isn't an ordinary ballot measure. It is the culmination of a movement that has been building for many years to replace the death penalty with a sentence of life without the possibility of parole. With one vote, Californians can solve a host of problems bedeviling its law enforcement system: the spiraling costs of incarceration and appeals for death row inmates, the legal tangles over methodology that have stalled executions in this state since 2006, and the unfairness built into a system in which convicts are more likely to be sentenced to death if their victims were white. And, more important, eliminating the death penalty would end the risk that the hands of all Californians will be stained with the blood of an innocent.
And:
If juries and courts were infallible, the death penalty might seem a reasonable punishment for society's most brutal killers. They aren't. In the absence of certainty, which is impossible to achieve, it is more ethical to impose less permanent sentences.
Earlier coverage of the California ballot initiative begins at the link; more on the Columbia HRLR article on Carlos DeLuna and the case of Todd Willingham, also available.
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