During his 8 years in office, former Los Angeles District Attorney Gil Garcetti had no problem telling his prosecutors to push hard to get death sentences for those he thought deserved it. Now Garcetti is one of those leading the charge for a ballot proposition to replace the state’s capital punishment statute with a sentence of life without the possibility of parole.
The Ventura Star has story on the issue that is a must read for anyone who wishes to have an opinion—for or against—the death penalty in the state of California.
Here’s a clip:
…..It takes five years just to appoint an attorney to handle a condemned murderer’s automatic appeal to the state Supreme Court, and typically five more years for the court to decide his case. The state habeas corpus proceedings take another two years. Then constitutional issues are raised in federal courts, where it typically takes 10 years for those cases to make their way through to the court of appeal — where relief is granted nearly 70 percent of the time, resulting in either new trials or new penalty proceedings.
Since the death penalty was reinstated in California in 1978, judgments of death have been rendered 812 times. The resolution of those cases to date: 718 inmates are incarcerated on San Quentin’s death row, 55 condemned inmates have died of natural causes, 19 have committed suicide, six died from other causes, one was executed in Missouri for a separate crime. And California has carried out just 13 executions.
As of 2008, there were 30 people who had been on death row for more than 25 years.
The cumulative cost for all this, above what taxpayers would have borne had the ultimate penalty been a life sentence without possibility of parole, is estimated at $4 billion. Just this year the cost of having the death penalty on the books is estimated at from $120 million to $184 million.
The record leads to one blunt conclusion, expressed by the authors of an exhaustive study published earlier this year in the Loyola of Los Angeles Law Review: “California has the most expensive and least effective death penalty law in the nation.”
That reality has been enough to make a convert of Garcetti, who has joined with other past participants in carrying out the death penalty such as former San Quentin warden Jeanne Woodford and Don Heller, the attorney who wrote the state’s death penalty law, to say the system just doesn’t work — not for taxpayers and not for public safety.
“You have people involved in the process who have reached the same conclusion,” he said. “It’s ineffective, and we can’t afford it.”
Texas and other states don’t have such a serious problem with the death penalty. Is California’s solution to drop the death penalty or to get its act together to handle those sentences effectively? You need to expand the question.
I’ll quote Richard Ramirez after he was sentenced to death on Nov. 7th 1989: “Big deal, death always went with the territory”.
That was 22 years ago.
Garcetti’s a joke and was when he was DA. I worked very closely with his office and he is very liberal. There is a way to fix the death penalty and do what the voters have repeatedly asked for. Get rid of the BS red tape and start executing those who earned it, YES…they earned it!!!