Time for California to Catch Up with the Death Penalty Decline

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By Natasha Minsker
ACLU of Northern California

Most of the country seems to be getting it: The death penalty is expensive, risky, and often unfair. A shift from death sentences to permanent imprisonment means significant savings and eliminates the risk of executing the innocent.  That’s why a growing number of states are choosing permanent imprisonment over the death penalty. In fact in 2009, the number of new death sentences nationwide reached the lowest level since the death penalty was reinstated in 1976.

Why, then, is California going in the wrong direction? The Golden State sent more people to death row last year than it did in the prior seven years. At the end of 2009, California’s death row was by far the largest and most costly in the United States.

The ACLU’s new report, Death in Decline ’09, shows that, in fact, the majority of California counties are getting it right: most of California’s 58 counties have effectively replaced the death penalty with permanent imprisonment. Pursuit of the death penalty in California is limited to just a few “killer counties.” Only three—Los Angeles, Orange and Riverside—accounted for 83% of all death sentences in 2009. The strange reality is fewer and fewer California counties are sending more and more people to death row.

Most startling is Los Angeles County. With 13 death sentences, Los Angeles was by far the leading death penalty county in the nation last year. LA sentenced more people to death in 2009 than the entire state of Texas. Meanwhile, Harris County, Texas, long the death penalty capital of the country, had zero death sentences last year.

The new faces on death row are also more likely to be Latino than before. Latinos comprised a staggering 50% of new death sentences in California in 2007, 38% in 2008, and 31% in 2009. In 2000, Latinos were only 19% of the death row population, even when Latinos comprised 33% of the people living in California. We don’t know what’s causing the increase in Latinos being sentenced to death—the state doesn’t keep the data needed to answer that question. Whatever the cause, it’s a disturbing trend in a diverse state like California.

So let’s review:

• The rest of the country has caught on that the death penalty is too expensive and risky.
• California - especially Los Angeles and a couple other counties – continues to waste resources that we don’t have on a death penalty system that doesn’t work.
• In the process, more and more Latinos are being sent to California’s death row, and we don’t know why.

As the death row population grows, so do the exorbitant costs of California’s death penalty system. But the money needed to fund the system just isn’t there. In fact, some local officials have taken to cutting costs by denying funding to defense attorneys, even though two out of three death sentences in California are reversed because of ineffective counsel at trial. Of the 700 people now on death row in California, 42% lack an attorney needed to handle their appeal or habeas petition. People now wait more than ten years on death row for an attorney. Meanwhile, memories fade, evidence is lost and the risk that an innocent person will be executed grows.

The California is on track to spend $1 billion on the death penalty in the next five years. For all the money we spend on the death penalty in California, only about 1 out of 100 people sentenced to death has actually been executed during the last thirty years. What is the point?

It’s time for California to get with the program. California has a better alternative: permanent imprisonment.  Every guilty person sentenced to permanent imprisonment has died in prison or will die in prison. It allows us to punish serious offenders while saving the state $1 billion in five years. The money we spend on the death penalty every year in California could provide health care for 1 million poor children through the Healthy Families program. Or these funds could be shifted to local police who now lack the resources needed to solve murders, to our beleaguered education system, or a dozens of other more urgent needs. It’s time for California to move forward: the death penalty is a mistake we can’t afford to keep making.

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Natasha Minsker is the death penalty policy director for the ACLU of Northern California. To find out how many people your county has sent to death row, view our interactive map of California death sentences.