The San Diego County District Attorney is not verbally gifted. But Bonnie Dumanis was on the mark when she called the death penalty in California a “hollow promise.” She said this after accepting a plea agreement with a man named John Gardner who raped and murdered two teenage girls. The killer traded his plea for a sentence of life in prison without parole.
California has, by far, the largest number of people on death row of any state. We have 702 condemned prisoners. And since the state’s death penalty was reinstated in 1976, only thirteen people have been executed. A story in the San Diego Union Tribune pointed out that during that time a total of 86 death-row inmates have died, most from natural causes, a few by suicide and even fewer by execution.
If justice delayed is justice denied, then hundreds of families of murder victims in California are being denied justice. In fact, the families who saw the killers of their sons, daughters, spouses and parents die of natural causes in San Quentin will be denied justice forever. This was clearly one of the reasons why the parents of those teenage girls agreed that the DA should settle for life in prison without parole. The death penalty in California is a cruel joke, and victims’ families are the butt of it.
I don’t know why death penalty proceedings for California convicts take decades. All condemned prisoners are guaranteed appeals to the State Supreme Court and federal district court. The California Commission on the Fair Administration of Justice wrote in a report that there’s a serious shortage of state public defenders to handle death penalty appeals.
But I suspect the real problem is that the people who run things in this state are not comfortable with the death penalty. Their reticence has led to endless delays in the process. The death penalty is a broken apparatus they don’t want to fix.
There are a lot of good reasons to be uncomfortable with the death penalty. Allowing the state to kill, on behalf of its residents, is morally questionable. Also, our justice system is not perfect. That means the death penalty will inevitably lead to innocent people being put to death.
If we agree on nothing else we must agree that California’s death penalty is a costly farce and it has to change. I see two ways. The first option, and certainly the most practical, is to simply get rid of it. Make life in prison without parole the ultimate punishment, reserved for the most horrible crimes.
The second possibility is to keep the death penalty, but require a higher burden of proof to sentence a person to death. Proof beyond a reasonable doubt isn’t enough. The state should have to prove its case beyond a shadow of doubt before it can kill a convict. That would dramatically reduce the number of people we put on death row, and it would make the appellate system less cumbersome and less necessary.
Dropping crimes rates and the passing of time have caused public opinion in California to turn against the death penalty, even though a majority still support it. I hope we will evolve into a society that no longer needs or wants the death penalty. But if society demands it, society should also demand a death penalty that protects the rights of the condemned and the rights of victims’ families, who deserve a prompt exercise of justice.
CUL-DE-SAC 