Death Penalty News

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 ...

The Committee on Revision of the Penal Code, created by the California state legislature to review the state’s criminal laws, has issued a report unanimously recommending that the state repeal its death penalty. The six-member committee’s 39-page Death Penalty Report , released November 17, 2021, also offers intermediate recommendations for reducing the size of California’s nearly 700-person death row—the largest of any state in the country. “After a thorough examination, the Committee has determined that the death penalty as created and enforced in California has not and cannot ensure justice and fairness for all Californians,” the report states. “More than forty years of experience have shown that the death penalty is the opposite of a simple and rational scheme. It has become so complicated and costly that it takes decades for cases to be fully resolved and it is imposed so arbitrarily — and in such a discriminatory fashion — that it cannot be called rational, fair, or constitutiona...

A California Supreme Court justice is calling on his colleagues to revisit the constitutionality of the death penalty after the court affirmed a death penalty verdict in a case that capital punishment opponents hoped would lead to sweeping reforms . On Thursday, the high court affirmed a death sentence verdict for Don’te Lamont McDaniel, who was convicted of two counts of first-degree murder and two counts of attempted murder. Justice Goodwin Liu authored the 77-page opinion affirming the sentence in adherence with precedent, but he also wrote a 30-page concurrence expressing doubts about the case law that allowed juries to consider certain circumstances that would increase the severity of a crime and allow for death penalty sentencing. The U.S. Supreme Court’s 2000 landmark decision in A p prendi v. New Jersey , which found “any fact that increases the penalty for a crime beyond the prescribed statutory maximum must be submitted to a jury and proved beyond a reasonable doubt,” raises...

SAN FRANCISCO — The California Supreme Court on Thursday decided to leave the state’s death penalty law intact, refusing an entreaty from Gov. Gavin Newsom that would have overturned scores of death sentences. In a unanimous decision, the state’s highest court said there was little legal support under state law for overhauling the law, as opponents of capital punishment urged. In fact, the court said, some of the precedents cited by defense lawyers actually undercut their position. Defense lawyers had argued the state’s capital punishment law was unconstitutional because it failed to require jurors to unanimously agree beyond a reasonable doubt on the reasons why a defendant should be sentenced to death instead of life without possibility of parole. A decision to impose the death penalty also should be made beyond a reasonable doubt, the standard now used in deciding guilt, the lawyers said. If the court had agreed, hundreds — if not all — death sentences would have had to be overturne...

SACRAMENTO —  Gov. Gavin Newsom on Monday threw his support behind the appeal of a man on death row convicted of murder, arguing in an amicus brief that “racial discrimination infects the administration of California’s death penalty.” The decision to intervene in the death row case follows a promise by Newsom during his first term as governor that no prisoner in the state would be executed while he is in office, a pledge made when he imposed a moratorium on the death penalty. “Since its inception, the American death penalty has been disproportionately applied, first, to enslaved Africans and African Americans, and, later to free Black people,” Newsom said in a statement Monday. “With this filing, we make clear that all Californians deserve the same right to a jury trial that is fair, and that it is a matter of life and death.” Newsom’s detailed objections to capital punishment were filed in an amicus brief to the California Supreme Court, which is hearing the appeal of Don’te LaMon...

Charles Manson, who ordered the murder of nine people in 1969, has died of natural causes at age 83. But how was it that the infamous cult leader was allowed to live out his days in prison, having been sentenced to death in 1971? Manson and his accomplices in “the family” escaped execution in the 1970s because of a technicality—or at least fortunate timing. Manson was tried over a period of seven months alongside Susan Atkins, Patricia Krenwinkel and Leslie Van Houten over the killings of actress Sharon Tate and eight others at the end of 1969. All four were found guilty and sentenced to death, along with Charles "Tex" Watson, another follower who was tried separately. However, Manson and his accomplices were allowed to live when, in 1972, the California Supreme Court invalidated the state’s death penalty statutes. As a result, the members of the family sitting on death row had their executions commuted. All were given life sentences and made eligible for parol...

The California Supreme Court decided Thursday that a key provision in last year’s ballot measure to speed executions failed to impose strict deadlines for resolving death penalty appeals. Proposition 66, sponsored by prosecutors and passed by 51% of voters, was intended to remove various hurdles that have prevented the state from executing an inmate in more than 10 years. Thursday’s ruling left most of the initiative intact, leading one of the sponsors to predict that executions would resume in months. But the decision, signed by five of the seven justices, construed the measure’s requirement that death penalty appeals must be decided within five years as “directive,” not mandatory. That deadline is merely “an exhortation to the parties and the courts to handle cases as expeditiously as is consistent with the fair and principled administration of justice,” Justice Carol A. Corrigan wrote for the majority. Because of a huge backlog of appeals, the California Suprem...

California's death chamber California could take a giant step closer to resuming executions when the state Supreme Court issues a highly anticipated ruling on a ballot measure to speed up the state's dysfunctional death penalty system. The California Supreme Court will rule Thursday on a lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of Proposition 66, a push to "mend not end" capital punishment in California. The measure beat a competing initiative on the November ballot that would have abolished the death penalty. Condemned inmates in California currently languish for decades and are more likely to die of natural causes than from lethal injection. There are nearly 750 inmates on death row and only 13 have been executed since 1978, the last in 2006. The California Supreme Court ruling comes as state officials face a Friday deadline to unveil a revised lethal injection drug protocol to execute inmates. The fight over the drug procedure, which is tied up in...

On Monday, the Supreme Court rejected Richard Boyer’s petition for review of a federal appeals court ruling that, in turn, rejected his argument that California’s long (and continuing) delay in carrying out his death sentence amounts to cruel and unusual punishment. Dissenting from that denial in Boyer v. Davis , Justice Stephen Breyer strongly suggested that he would find a constitutional violation in the 32 years that Boyer has been on death row. To Court watchers, the Breyer dissent was hardly surprising. Last year, in a dissent from a decision upholding Oklahoma’s lethal injection protocol, Justice Breyer called on his colleagues to reconsider the constitutionality of the death penalty. Justice Breyer offered long delay as one of the chief reasons for concluding that the death penalty is unconstitutional. He cited statistics showing an average delay of 18 years between sentence and execution. He calculated that at current rates, “the average person on death row woul...

California's death row "When we were sentenced to death," wrote Carlos M. Argueta from death row in California, "we weren't sentenced to be mistreated, humiliated, discriminated against, psychologically tortured and kept in solitary dungeons until the day of our executions. Never once did the judge say that was to be part of our sentence." He was speaking about life in San Quentin State Prison's Adjustment Center, a "prison within a prison" with a name worthy of any fictional dystopia. The Adjustment Center is at the epicenter of California's death row system, which The Atlantic recently called "simultaneously the most and least prolific wielder of the death penalty." Although the state continually metes out death sentences - there were 749 people awaiting execution last July, nearly twice as many as the next highest state - almost no one is executed. California held just 6 executions since the start of the 21st century, ...