ANOTHER ATTEMPT TO KILL THE DEATH PENALTY IN CA

by Bob Walsh

The legislature of the formerly great state of California is AGAIN preparing a ballot initiative which would, if passed into law, destroy the de jure death penalty in CA. The death penalty is already non-functional in any de facto sense. Death Row in CA is over 800 and we have no executed a prisoner in over ten years. They do, however, regularly kill each other, themselves, or die of natural causes.

The attack will be reasonably smart and two-pronged. One is the basic "unfair against people of color." The other is the "costs too much." There are numerous AUTOMATIC, REQUIRED appeals of the death penalty in CA, including automatic, unwaivable, appeal to the state supreme court. There are relatively few lawyers available for this work, mostly because it doesn't pay shit so it takes YEARS for a prisoner to exhaust all appeals. Then a good lawyer will always be able to come up with new issues to appeal.

Right now the best way to have a long, relatively comfortable and relatively safe time in a CA prison is to be under death sentence.

These ballot propositions come up every few years and thus far the voters have always said HELL NO, they want to keep the death penalty. They want to streamline it and reduce the cost, but not get rid of it. That being said, what the voters want does not mean shit to the legislature. The VOTERS said they did NOT want gay marriage in CA. Special interests appealed to have the vote thrown out. The state refused to defend the referendum vote of it's own citizens.

The legislature does not care what the voters want. They give the voters what they think the voters should have, and the voters keep voting these assholes in. CA now has a super majority of Democraps in both houses and all constitutional officers are Democraps, so the chances are excellent that this will make it to the 2020 ballot.