A LOADED QUESTION DESIGNED TO ABOLISH THE DEATH PENALTY

“Do you want to continue to spend an average of $125 million a year on a system that's resulted in 13 executions since 1978, or would you rather change the maximum criminal sentence to life without parole and spend that excess money to hire teachers or put cops on the street?”

That’s what state senator Loni Hancock, a Democrat from Berkeley, wants to put before California voters. What person in his right mind wouldn’t vote to abolish the death penalty when the ballot measure is worded like that. I sure do hope the California senate will have the good sense to reject this Berkeley Democrat's bill.

Even the authors of the study that led to Hancock’s apoplectic reaction do not call for the abolition of the death penalty. They want to reform the system that leads to endless appeals and years and years on death row. When a murderer is sentenced to death under the current system in California there will be no end in sight for the final disposition.

THE COSTLIEST EXECUTIONS IN AMERICA
By Timm Herdt

Ventura County Star
August 23, 2011

Judge Arthur Alarcon, 86, has arguably had more experience dealing with the death penalty than anyone in California. He was a deputy district attorney in Los Angeles County for a decade, advised Gov. Pat Brown on clemency appeals, chaired the state parole board, spent 15 years as a Superior Court judge and, since 1979, has been a federal appeals court judge.

So he speaks with some authority when he renders his verdict on it. He calls it a "multibillion-dollar debacle."

In June, Alarcon and law professor Paula Mitchell published the first comprehensive study to detail the total costs of prosecuting and litigating death-penalty cases in California and of incarcerating those sentenced to Death Row.

Their conclusion: Since capital punishment was reinstated in California in 1978, it has cost taxpayers $4 billion over and above what it would have cost had the maximum punishment been life in prison without possibility of parole.

Further, the state is poised to spend nearly $1 billion on a new Death Row that is designed to house 1,000 condemned inmates and is likely to be filled to capacity by 2014.

The study's conclusion and its timing hit Senate Public Safety Committee Chairwoman Loni Hancock, D-Berkeley, like a lightning bolt. She'd just been through another round of massive budget cuts, having voted to slash state support for public universities, cut holes in the public safety net and reduce funding for the day-to-day operations of the courts.

She quickly put together a bill that, if approved, would ask California voters this question: Do you want to continue to spend an average of $125 million a year on a system that's resulted in 13 executions since 1978, or would you rather change the maximum criminal sentence to life without parole and spend that excess money to hire teachers or put cops on the street?

The bill has the potential to become the brightest flash point of the final two and a half weeks of this year's legislative session, which will end Sept. 9. Whether it becomes that will be decided Thursday, when the Assembly Appropriations Committee will decide whether to allow Hancock's SB 490 and 110 other bills to pass through its legislative bottleneck.

On Tuesday, Hancock invited Alarcon and Mitchell to the Capitol to make the first public presentation on their findings before her committee.

If she was expecting an over-the-top endorsement of her bill, she didn't get it.

Alarcon did, in fact, recite all the particulars of his indictment of a dysfunctional system.

Because the state does not spend enough on lawyers to handle death penalty appeals, he noted, the backlog in California is three times the national average. Because the state requires direct appeal to the Supreme Court, death penalty cases make up 20 percent of the court's workload. It takes four or five years just to appoint a defense attorney to handle the initial appeal, and another three years or more to appoint counsel for habeas corpus proceedings.

"The cost of maintaining the death penalty has become an onerous financial burden on California taxpayers," he testified.

But Alarcon offered some ideas other than abolishing capital punishment: amend the Constitution to allow appellate courts to handle capital appeals; change the evidentiary standards so that prosecutors could seek the death penalty only when they have extraordinarily strong evidence such as DNA samples; put an extra $85 million a year into hiring attorneys at the state's Habeas Corpus Research Center.

The bottom line of Alarcon's and Mitchell's findings is that the system is horribly broken and has become a bottomless money pit. It has become, they write, "the most expensive and least effective death penalty law in the nation."

Because voters established it, only voters can fix it. And voters can't be expected to make sound decisions unless they know all the facts — and until now, no one has ever told them how much it costs.

Mitchell testified that every time Californians have been presented with a ballot initiative to expand the circumstances under which the death penalty can be sought, the fiscal analysis in the official voter pamphlet has told them the costs would be insignificant. Each time, she said, they were misinformed.

The point of the study, Alarcon said, is to initiate a fact-based discussion so that Californians can do their own cost-benefit analysis of the death penalty. "It's so voters know the truth," he said, "so they can make an informed decision whether they want to continue a dysfunctional system or replace it with something else."