The San Francisco Chronicle reports, "Ex-justice who supports death penalty backs measure to abolish it." It's written by Bob Egelko. Here's an extended excerpt:
As a California Supreme Court justice for nearly a decade, Carlos Moreno estimates he voted to uphold more than 200 death sentences, and says he doesn’t regret any of those decisions. “In all the cases I saw, the convicted defendants richly deserved to be executed,” he said in an interview this week.
But Moreno, now an attorney in Los Angeles, is backing a November ballot measure that would repeal the death penalty in California and change the maximum sentence to life in prison without parole. The ballot arguments for Proposition 34, posted on the secretary of state’s website, include his statement that “there’s no chance California’s death penalty can ever be fixed. The millions wasted on this broken system would be much better spent keeping teachers, police and firefighters on their jobs.”
The death penalty has been politically popular in California — voters resoundingly endorsed it in 1972 and 1978, and in 1986 removed three state Supreme Court justices who had regularly voted to overturn death sentences. Although support in some other states has been declining, a Field Poll in September found 68 percent backing for capital punishment in California.
But opponents note that polls have also found more Californians favor life without parole than death as a punishment for murder, the alternative that Prop. 34 presents. They hope to shift the debate in November to the question of whether the death penalty in California is worth what it costs in time and money. That’s why Moreno, who says he still favors the death penalty in theory, now wants to abolish it.
“I would think that we could fix the system, make it more efficient and actually faster, but I just don’t see that coming anywhere in the future,” said the former justice, a Gray Davis appointee who retired from the court in February 2011. “In California the people may be willing to support the death penalty in principle but they’re not willing to fund it.”
The costs amount to $184 million a year, according to a study last year co-written by another death penalty supporter, Arthur Alarcon, a judge on the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. That covers the extra expenses of trials, appeals and maintaining a Death Row that now houses 725 inmates. On average, their cases take more than 20 years to decide — prompting Moreno to observe that when death sentences get overturned, “I don’t see how you can realistically retry those cases.” Death penalty appeals also take up more than 25 percent of the caseload of the state Supreme Court, which automatically reviews every verdict in a capital case.
"Prosecutors use of death penalty waning in Alameda County," is the Oakland Tribune news report by Paul T. Rosynsky.
A decade ago, a jury's decision to send a murder defendant to death row in Alameda County would not have been as such an anomaly as the jury's decision last week to condemn triple-murderer David Mills.
In 2002, three murder defendants were sent to death row while the county's district attorney's office decided to pursue the death penalty against two accused murderers.
And a decade before that the death penalty was even more popular as Alameda County juries sent five defendants to death row.
Yet, this year, Mills will be the only special circumstances murder defendant sent to death row from the county while District Attorney Nancy O'Malley has declined to seek the punishment against any defendant eligible for lethal injection.
In fact, since taking over the seat from former District Attorney Tom Orloff, O'Malley's office has only sought the death penalty once in a decision that was later reversed just before the case went to trial. In that time, there has been more than 30 defendants who were eligible for capital punishment.
O'Malley recently said she is not adverse to using the death penalty and still considers it a valuable tool to use against certain murder defendants. But, O'Malley did not explain why there has been such a dramatic drop-off in the number of death penalty cases sought.
Instead, she said, each case that is eligible for the death penalty is reviewed by a committee of high-ranking prosecutors which makes a recommendation about whether to pursue the ultimate penalty. O'Malley has final say on any decision.Alameda County's is not alone in its apparent hesitance to seek the death penalty. Statistics provided by some local district attorney's offices and the state Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation show that the penalty has become less popular throughout the state.
The Woodland Daily Democrat carries the OpEd, "DA's death penalty views out of touch, by Richard Van Zandt, a Yolo County Public Defender.
When Reisig bemoans the delays and costs of the death penalty, what exactly does he propose getting rid of? Qualified appellate attorneys? What appeals does he favor removing? The writ process? When he complains about "misinformation," should he not look inward and try to correct the misinformation prosecutors and police put forth in many of these exonerees's trials because the prosecutor and/or police failed to turn over key information to the defense or used knowingly corrupt police informants?
As recently as 2007, one of Reisig's own deputy attorneys was found to have not turned over taped interviews with his star witness in a murder trial. This information was found by the defense attorney in a storage locker, near the end of the second trial. (The first trial was overturned due to the misconduct of the same prosecutor.)
What was the prosecutor's excuse offered to the judge? He was getting "divorced" during the first trial and "stress" caused him to lose track of the evidence for the second trial.
The judge bought the excuse and found the misconduct was "not intentional."
And Reisig himself had a case reversed when he failed to turn over material evidence, resulting in an Appellate Court reversal. When courts rarely sanction prosecutors, it's no surprise that prosecutorial misconduct is one of the leading causes of wrongful convictions. What happened to the divorced prosecutor? Reisig promoted him to supervisor.
The Oakland Tribune joins newspapers endorsing repeal, "Proposition 34 -- California's death penalty has got to go." It's the same editorial carried by the Mercury News earlier in the week.
Guilt or innocence aside, it's clear that the death penalty is unfairly applied in California. A county-by-county study of death sentences from 2000-07 found residents of Alameda County nearly eight times more likely to be sentenced to death than residents of Santa Clara County. Blacks in California are sentenced to death at a rate five times higher than their proportion of the population.
The tide is turning on support for the death penalty. California Supreme Court Chief Justice Tani Cantil-Sakauye, nominated by Republican Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, said in 2011 that the death penalty is "no longer effective" here. Donald Heller, the man who wrote the 1978 proposition that brought back capital punishment, now favors abolishing it. So does Jeanne Woodford, a former warden of San Quentin prison.
Executions are barbaric, yet do not prevent crime any more effectively than life in prison. Because the high costs of death row pull money away from education and from police departments struggling to take active criminals off the street, it is making Californians less safe, not more.
Earlier coverage from California and Prop. 34 begins at the link.
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