Death to the Death Penalty in California
Voters will be confronted with competing death penalty proposals on the November ballot: the praiseworthy Proposition 62 and the defective Proposition 66.
The entrance to the east block of death row at San Quentin State Prison in San Quentin, Calif. (Eric Risberg / AP)
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Franky Carrillo, who was convicted of a crime he didn’t commit, was released after spending 20 years in prison. Witnesses recanted, and new evidence came to light. “I am living proof that our justice system sometimes gets it wrong,” Carrillo says. “If I had been sentenced to death instead of life in prison, this might have been a different story.” An innocent man might have been put to death.
The Catholic Bishops of America supports Proposition 62, stating “capital punishment has repeatedly been shown to be severely and irrevocably flawed in its application.”
Endorsers of Proposition 62 include the California Democratic Party, California Labor Federation, Service Employees International Union, California Federation of Teachers, Exonerated Nation, National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers, Rainbow Push Coalition, California NAACP, Clergy and Laity United for Economic Justice, California Catholic Conference, and the League of Women Voters of California.
Proposition 62 would replace California’s failed death penalty system with life in prison, guaranteeing that the worst criminals would never be released. It would provide a measure of respect to victims’ families by requiring convicted murderers to work and pay restitution. And it would save taxpayers $150 million per year, money that could be spent on education and repairing California’s crumbling infrastructure.
The United Nations Special Rapporteurs on summary executions, Christof Heyns (whose term recently expired), and on torture, Juan E. Mendez, have called on the U.S. government to initiate a federal moratorium on the imposition of the death penalty with a view to abolish it. They observed that more than three-quarters of countries around the world have abolished the death penalty either in law or practice. “Despite all efforts to implement capital punishment in a ‘humane’ fashion, time and again executions have resulted in a degrading spectacle,” they wrote. “The death penalty as a form of punishment is inherently flawed.”
None of the three major international criminal tribunals—the International Criminal Court, the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, and the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda—allow the death penalty as a sentencing option for the most heinous of crimes over which they have jurisdiction.
Former U.S. Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens (quoting former Justice Byron White’s 1972 concurrence in Furman v. Georgia) thinks “the imposition of the death penalty represents ‘the pointless and needless extinction of life with only marginal contributions to any discernible social or public purposes. A penalty with such negligible returns to the State [is] patently excessive and cruel and unusual punishment violative of the Eighth Amendment.’ ”
In a 1976 Boston Globe article, then-U.S. Supreme Court Justice Arthur L. Goldberg wrote: “The deliberate institutionalized taking of human life by the state is the greatest conceivable degradation to the dignity of the human personality.”
When speaking to the French Chamber of Deputies in 1830, years after witnessing the excesses of the French Revolution, the Marquis de Lafayette, said, “I shall ask for the abolition of the punishment of death until I have the infallibility of human judgment demonstrated to me.”
The premeditated killing of human beings by the state is expensive and just plain wrong. Californians should abolish it.
Marjorie Cohn is professor emerita at Thomas Jefferson School of Law, former president of the National Lawyers Guild, and deputy secretary general of the International Association of Democratic Lawyers. Her books include “Cameras in the Courtroom: Television and the Pursuit of Justice.” Visit her website and follow her on Twitter at @marjoriecohn.
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