Death Penalty News

On January 17, 2006, California exe­cut­ed Clarence Ray Allen — the last per­son put to death by the state. Two decades lat­er, California’s death row pop­u­la­tion has fall­en to 580 pris­on­ers , down from its peak near 750 in the mid-2010s . In the time since Mr. Allen’s exe­cu­tion, the death penal­ty in California has seen sus­tained scruti­ny as con­cerns with racial dis­crim­i­na­tion, inno­cence, and costs con­tin­ue to grow. Governor Gavin Newsom has placed a mora­to­ri­um on exe­cu­tions, death-sen­tenced pris­on­ers have been moved to less restric­tive con­di­tions in gen­er­al pop­u­la­tion, and advo­cates have urged the gov­er­nor to grant mass clemency.

California’s death penalty costs taxpayers $150 million a year. The average appeal of a death sentence, when considered by state and federal courts, takes more than 30 years to resolve. Blacks make up 6.5% of the state’s population and 35% of its condemned inmates. Jurors in capital cases are disproportionately white, due in part to a selection process that excludes death penalty opponents. Since enacting its current death penalty laws in 1977 and 1978, California has executed 13 prisoners — none since 2006 — while 156 condemned inmates have died of other causes. Those findings come from the Committee on Revision of the Penal Code, established by law last year to recommend changes in the criminal law of a state with the nation’s largest prison system and most populous Death Row. Its latest report calls for repeal of the death penalty, an option California voters considered and narrowly rejected in 2012 and 2016. Capital punishment in California is “imposed so arbitrarily — and in such ...

Prosecutors and judges give death penalty decisions despite Governor Newsom’s moratorium The death penalty in California is due to face another hurdle this year following a number of judges and prosecutors respectively giving and asking for the death penalty in recent murder cases. Going against the moratorium On Friday, prosecutors in San Diego County asked for the death penalty against John Earnest, who killed 1 and injured 3 more in a Poway Synagogue shooting.  Before that, in February, a Riverside County prosecutor asked for the death penalty in a Palm Springs quadruple murder case.  And in January a Riverside County judge sentenced a man to death for murdering his mother in Indio. All of these decisions have come after Governor Newsom’s decision last year to put a moratorium on all death penalty cases, putting a temporary hold on the death penalty in the state despite the state not having an execution happen since 2006. “We cannot advance th...

LOS ANGELES — In Courtroom 106 in downtown Los Angeles, a jury has begun hearing testimony in the long-awaited trial of a man accused of stabbing to death two women in their homes at night. The killer stalked his victims, ingratiating himself as a repairman, and then killed them in a spasm of violence. One victim was nearly decapitated; another’s breasts were slashed off. One of the women, a former girlfriend of the actor Ashton Kutcher, was found in a pool of blood on the stairs. The gruesomeness of the killings and the celebrity connection have earned the suspect the tabloid-style moniker of The Hollywood Ripper. Prosecutors are asking jurors to deliver a death sentence. Nearly 400 miles to the north, in Sacramento, prosecutors have come together to seek a death sentence for Joseph James DeAngelo, the man accused of being the so-called Golden State Killer, who terrorized communities up and down the state in the 1970s and ’80s before an arrest was made last year with the...

Court ruling, methods of execution, elections and other factors have all played a role in the history of capital punishment in California The death penalty was originally authorized in California under the Criminal Practices Act of 1851.  Today, there are more than 730 inmates on the largest death row in the United States, but due to a series of court decisions, legal challenges and changes in methodology, there have been no executions in California since 2006. As of March 2019, there are 737 inmates on death row in California.  Seventy-nine condemned inmates have died of natural causes since 1978, when the state reinstated capital punishment after a series of legal challenges.  An additional 26 inmates died by suicide. California has executed 13 inmates since re-instatement.  Two of California's inmates were executed in other states. Below, a timeline of key moments, events, decisions and elections that shaped the history of capita...

SAN FRANCISCO — California’s Democratic governor announced Wednesday he was temporarily shutting down the nation’s most populous death row .  Since the state reinstated the death penalty in 1978, it has executed 13 inmates, the last one in 2006. Here are things to know about California’s death row.

Both in 2012 and 2016, Californians cast their votes in favor — by extremely narrowly margins in ballot initiatives — of having the state retain the death penalty. So on Wednesday, when Gov. Gavin Newsom put a moratorium on California’s use of the death penalty, he not only spared the lives of 737 men and women facing execution by the state, he stirred up a hornet’s nest of praise and invective. For Elisabeth Semel, a UC Berkeley law professor and director of the Berkeley Law Death Penalty Clinic , much of the verbiage being thrown around to attack Newsom’s move is missing the point. The governor hasn’t overturned the vote, she says, and couldn’t if he wanted to. “First of all, as governor, he has the absolute power to grant reprieves,” Semel says. “It’s in the constitution and not debatable. He hasn’t abolished the death penalty. But he is seeing where we take this as a state. The votes in 2012 and 2016 were (in favor of the death penalty) by a hair. This is a state tha...

  California's next governor could be forced to make a life-or-death decision that the state's top executive hasn't faced in over a decade: whether to spare an inmate facing execution. There are nearly 750 people on death row at San Quentin State Prison, more than any other state, and decisions made by the next governor will help set the pace of executions going forward. 5 of the 6 top candidates oppose the death penalty. But few say they'd use the office's commutation power to broadly move inmates from death row to life in prison. "Unless Jerry Brown steps in or one of these candidates for governor steps in, I think there's going to be executions in California," said Erwin Chemerinsky, the dean of UC Berkeley Law School. "It seems like it's a matter of time." California hasn't executed an inmate since Clarence Ray Allen on Jan. 17, 2006. And more than 1/2 of the inmates on California death row have waited more than 20 ...

Supporters of capital punishment in California claimed victory after the state Supreme Court upheld a voter-approved measure to speed up death sentences, but they still have to clear a major obstacle before executions can resume: Getting approval for a new lethal injection method. The next step in that fight is expected on Friday, when state corrections officials say they will seek regulatory approval for a revised drug protocol to execute inmates. The new regulations would allow California's death row inmates to be executed using 1 of 2 different drugs or choose the gas chamber. The revised proposal would follow a highly anticipated California Supreme Court ruling on Thursday about Proposition 66, a push to "mend not end" capital punishment in California by tightening rules on court appeals by inmates. Condemned inmates in California currently languish for decades and are more likely to die of natural causes than from lethal injection. There are nearly...