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The gas chamber at San Quentin prison
was used for executions by lethal injection
until it was deemed obsolete, mainly for
lack of space. A brand new facility was
built at taxpayers' expense to accommodate
California's new death house. |
[There] are the opposing viewpoints that will play out in the coming weeks over Proposition 34, which asks voters to end the death penalty in California and allow death row inmates to be resentenced to life in prison without any chance of parole.
Supporters of the measure, ranging from the American Civil Liberties Union to attorneys and a former San Quentin warden, are waging a campaign based on the notion that the entire process is far too costly, and that scrapping the death penalty could save cash-strapped California hundreds of millions of dollars.
They note that legal hurdles have severely limited the state's ability to carry out executions, and that since the death penalty was reinstated in 1978 only 13 men have been executed in California – the last in 2006.
Another 729 inmates are on death row awaiting executions that may be years or decades away.
"The cost of the system today is so enormous," said Don Heller, the Sacramento attorney who wrote the 1978 initiative to restore the death penalty and who now wants to do away with capital punishment.
"It's cost $4 billion to execute 13 people since 1978, approximately $330 million per execution. It makes no sense, particularly in these current economic times when we're cutting back on public safety and education."
The measure includes a provision that would take $100 million out of the state's general fund over four years and direct it to local law enforcement, money that supporters say would be more than offset by savings from ending death penalty trials, appeals and other costs.
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| San Quentin brand new execution chamber |
Supporters of the death penalty say those arguments are hypocritical and just plain wrong.
"Basically, it doesn't cost as much as they claim and it doesn't need to cost as much as it does," said Kent Scheidegger, legal director of the Criminal Justice Legal Foundation in Sacramento. "The system is entirely fixable and we've known for years how to fix it."
Scheidegger and others say the delays and huge costs that proponents of Proposition 34 cite have been created by the ACLU and other death penalty opponents.
Legal challenges to California's method of execution, currently a three-drug process, have stalled any executions since 2006 and there is no end in sight, partly because of a shortage of one of the three drugs.
Scheidegger notes that there are currently 13 inmates on death row whose appeals have been exhausted and who could be put to death in short order if the state switched to a one-drug process, as some other states have.
"They could do single drug (executions) tomorrow," Sacramento County District Attorney Jan Scully said. "They have practiced it."
Source: Sacramento Bee, Sept. 4, 2012
