California: We all pay the price for death penalty

GOV. Arnold Schwarzenegger has declared that we are facing "financial Armageddon," yet California continues to waste hundreds of millions of dollars on a dysfunctional death penalty.

This year's budget already makes deep cuts to drug treatment, struggling schools and mental health programs.

The very real prospect of a $40 billion budget deficit by June 2010 may require even more cuts. This puts every one of us at risk. We are cutting the very programs that help reduce violent crime and without them, violent crime may well increase.

Meanwhile, we continue to waste more than $250 million on an ineffective and broken death penalty, and it's a price we can no longer afford.

In these times of unprecedented budget shortfalls and financial crisis, it's important to understand how the state is spending that $250 million on the death penalty:

- $117 million is for the extra costs of death row housing, attorneys for the prosecution and defense, and court costs. These are the extra expenses we pay every year to have the death penalty in California-expenses that would disappear if we replaced the death penalty with permanent imprisonment (which has no opportunity for parole), but expenses that are required as long as we have a death penalty.

- $136 million is to begin construction of a new death row facility. We are forced to build a new death row because our current facility is overcrowded and broken down. The total estimated cost for completing the project is now $400 million and the costs for running the facility are estimated at $1 billion for the first 20 years.

While we waste more than $250 million on a death penalty that everyone agrees is flawed, we are slashing funding for education and vital services for the neediest Californians. Our escalating budget deficit and the failing economy will undoubtedly lead to even deeper cuts.

These budget cuts hit the programs that we most need to prevent violent crime: funding for struggling schools, drug treatment, mental health services, and assistance to the working poor; programs to reduce methamphetamine use and prevent domestic violence; programs that seek to protect our children from lead poisoning and the effects of parental drug use.

We are cutting programs that actually do result in fewer murders and reduce violent crime by protecting and assisting the most vulnerable: poor children. The impact of these cuts will last for a generation or more.

But we have a choice: If we simply replace the failing death penalty with condemning the worst offenders to permanent imprisonment, we could restore funding for all of these programs. That's right, all of these programs.

In tight budget times, we must all make tough choices. This choice should be easy. Do we pay $250 million this year for a death penalty that does no good, or do we provide food and health care to poor children, treatment to drug addicts and the mentally ill, support for struggling families and protection for the elderly?

For Californians who want to live in safe and healthy communities, the answer is clear. The time has come to replace the death penalty with permanent imprisonment.

Source: Opinion, Mark Leno, D-San Francisco, represents Marin in the state Senate. He is chairman of the senate Public Safety Committee; Marin Independent Journal