With a widespread shortage of execution drugs used in the now-familiar “cocktails,” officials have now aimed to “let corrections officials choose from four types of powerful barbiturates to execute prisoners,” according to KCRA Sacramento. “A choice would be made for each execution, depending on which drug is available. The single drug would replace the series of three drugs that were last used in 2006, when 76-year-old Clarence Ray Allen was executed for ordering a triple murder.”

“The plan to use barbiturates to execute inmates sentenced to die in the most populous U.S. state drew fire from religious activists, who called capital punishment grisly and anti-democratic at a hearing in Sacramento,” Reuters reported. “Law-and-order advocates urged its adoption.”

“If the new protocol is adopted by corrections officials and voters do not outlaw the death penalty next November, the state could theoretically begin executing 18 prisoners who have exhausted their appeals. Legal challenges to the lethal injection drug, however, could drag on for years.”

Opponents of the new plan insisted that it amounted to a trial-and-error approach. “The American Civil Liberties Union of Northern California is suing to obtain at least 79,000 corrections department documents related to lethal injections,” KCRA noted. “It says the regulations may lack enough safeguards to prevent the state from using backdoor ways to obtain execution drugs that manufacturers never intended for that purpose.” Past cocktails have been harshly criticized for sometimes failing to execute inmates as quickly and painlessly as lethal injection was intended to do.

Languishing inmates

Much of the frustration around the issue stems from the unique backlog that has built up on the state’s Death Row. “It’s been 10 years since California executed its last death row inmate. Since then, the death row population has grown to 745,” KQED noted. “Since 1978, 117 death row inmates have died, the vast majority from natural causes and suicide.”

Although California’s Death Row has ballooned to an extraordinary size over the years, other states have found themselves burdened by court requirements in similar ways. Florida, second to California in the size of its death row population, recently faced a Supreme Court ruling that has thrown the status of its condemned inmates into question. “Death penalty prosecutions are stalled, and state lawmakers are hustling to write and pass a new death penalty law before their session ends in six weeks,” the New York Times reported. “Also in question is whether the 390 inmates awaiting execution in Florida will remain on death row or be resentenced to life in prison.” The predicament, which has gained the attention of reformers and activists across  the political spectrum, has contributed to the rise of execution reform as a hot-button issue around the country.

Divided opinion

California’s own controversy has strengthened amid a sharp divide in statewide public opinion over capital punishment. Voters, a new poll found, have “now equally divided between scrapping the death penalty altogether and speeding up the path to executing inmates on the nation’s largest death row,” according to the San Jose Mercury News. “The poll found that 47 percent of voters favor replacing the death penalty with life in prison without the possibility of parole in California, up from 40 percent in 2014. But at the same time, the poll shows that 48 percent of registered voters would support proposals to accelerate the state’s notoriously slow system of resolving death penalty appeals to pick up the pace of executions.” Both those proposals were likely to wind up on this election year’s ballot in the form of initiatives.

Opinions have split even among Death Row inmates themselves. “Opinions vary, just like I’m sure they vary on the outside,” one inmate, Charles Crawford II, told KQED. “Some of us are against it, some of us not so much. Some of us, it’s like if they’re going to do it, do it and not have us sittin’ here for 20 or 30 years.”

A new coalition

The first group, Taxpayers for Sentencing Reform, has teed up the Justice That Works Act of 2016, an initiative that would fully repeal the Golden State’s use of capital punishment. Criminal sentencing would max out at life in prison without the possibility of parole, plus “a provision that requires them to work in prison and forward most of the wages to the families of victims,” as the group noted in a press release.

Taxpayers for Sentencing Reform has assembled a broader-than-expected coalition of interests, including some conservatives who see the current system as too dysfunctional to continue. “One supporter of the initiative to repeal capital punishment in California is Ron Briggs, who was a manager of the successful 1978 initiative campaign to expand the state’s death penalty law. That measure was sponsored by Briggs’ father, state Sen. John Briggs, R-Fullerton,” the San Francisco Chronicle reported. The younger Briggs described California’s capital punishment regime as “just another dysfunctional big-government program that wastes billions of dollars without achieving its goals,” according to the Chronicle.

Although officials in Sacramento have claimed a full repeal would save not more than $150 million yearly, Taxpayers for Sentencing Reform asserted in its release that the state of California spent “at least $5 billion in sentencing more than 900 people to death” since 1978, while actually executing “13 of those 900.”

The workings of the capital punishment have taken on a particular sense of statewide urgency as death sentences have risen in California while falling nationwide. Southern California alone has taken a national lead in sentencing the convicted to death. “All told, courts have sentenced eight people to death in Riverside County this year, more than any other county in the United States,” the Los Angeles Times reported, citing a report issued by the nonprofit Death Penalty Information Center. “The county accounts for 16 percent of all death sentences imposed in the United States this year, the report said.”

Injection trouble

The dip in U.S. executions has been driven in part by a series of lawsuits over botched and painful administrations of lethal injection drugs. “In the last few years, states around the U.S. have struggled to administer lethal injections to death row inmates after pharmaceutical companies stopped selling drugs to departments of corrections that were formerly in wide use,” as Time noted. “In response, states have turned to previously untried drugs like midazolam, which was used in several prolonged lethal injections in Oklahoma, Arizona and Ohio. The drug was at the heart of a Supreme Court case earlier this summer that ultimately found Oklahoma’s lethal injection protocol did not violate the Eighth Amendment’s ban on cruel and unusual punishment.”

California stopped executing Death Row inmates in 2006, when a federal judge determined “that flaws in lethal injections and staff training created an undue risk of a botched and agonizing execution,” the Chronicle recalled.

Mend it, don’t end it?

With an eye toward reforming California’s system without scrapping the death penalty completely, state district attorneys have created an initiative that would save money and reduce the agony of languishing on Death Row by accelerating inmates’ appeals. “It would also change the way they’re housed to save money,” as KPPC reported. Their Death Penalty Reform and Savings Act of 2016 “would limit inmate appeals, which can drag on for decades, and expedite executions,” according to KQED. Like the Justice That Works Act, the DA’s initiative “would also give the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation more latitude in housing condemned inmates and require them to work, with 70 percent of their wages going to crime victims,” the station added.

I have a lot of problems with the death penalty. It is just to kill the worst criminals, who have removed themselves from civil society because of their murders and other high crimes. But I don’t trust the current California or U.S. governments to execute the right people. These governments themselves are lawless and laugh at justice.

Even so, it’s silly for anti-capital punishment advocates to argue their case because California’s death-row backlog is too costly. A new initiative being talked up claims that ending the death penalty, and putting death-row inmates back with the regular prison population, would save $200 million a year.

Reports the Fresno Bee, “Now, a growing chorus of death penalty critics who for years focused on moral arguments are making a pocketbook appeal to voters: Their ballot measure to abolish the death penalty focuses on the costs to taxpayers to execute a prisoner. They say they have collected enough signatures to get it on the Nov. 6 ballot.

“‘It is time to stop wasting money,’ said Natasha Minsker, statewide campaign manager for SAFE California, which proposed the measure. SAFE stands for Savings, Accountability and Full Enforcement.

“Proponents of the initiative say taxpayers will save $1 billion over five years by replacing the death penalty with life in prison without parole. Those savings, they say, would be better spent on unsolved rape and murder cases, and for hiring teachers and building roads. There are 722 condemned prisoners on death row — including 42 from the central San Joaquin Valley’.”

Well, if money is the issue, then there’s a simpler way to save it: Start executing those on death row.

California’s death penalty continues to be wound up in court cases. But Texas has been executing criminals for years with the approbation of the same federal courts.

So, why not just adopt Texas’ rules, to the letter, concerning executions? Of if that doesn’t work, ship the murderers to Texas for the executions. As in California, Texas uses lethal injections.

Texas executes about 25 criminals a year. Adjusting for population, the rate would be about 38 per year in California.

For our 722 condemned criminals, it would take about 19 years to send them to their eternal rewards. Start with the youngest members of Death Row to save on the long-term costs of incarceration.

Additions to the death-row population would be offset by those who died of natural causes.

So the savings would add up fast.

Jan. 31, 2012

State Sen. Lori Hancock, D-Berkeley, said this week that she plans to introduce legislation that would shutter California’s death row. She argues that capital punishment has proven “an expensive failure” and proposes that the sentences of inmates currently facing a date with the executioner be converted to life without parole.

Hancock timed her announcement to coincide with the release of a report, co-authored by U.S. 9th Circuit Judge Arthur L. Alarcon and Loyola Law School professor Paula M. Mitchell, which misleadingly suggests that the death penalty costs the state’s taxpayers a whopping $308 million per execution.

Multiplying that figure times the 714 state inmates currently awaiting lethal injection, it amounts to nearly $220 billion to clear out death row. That has led some death penalty foes, masquerading as fiscal conservatives, to suggest that California could do much to solve its continuing budget woes by adopting Hancock’s legislation.

Well, if it really were true that it costs the state $308 million every time it carries out a death sentence, as the report by Alarcon and Mitchell implies, even the 70 percent of California residents who support capital punishment would be inclined to back Hancock’s legislation.

But the state’s actual execution of convicted murderers is relatively inexpensive. Clinically speaking, all they do is strap an inmate to a gurney and inject him with a lethal combination drugs. The cost for the drugs, the medical technicians administering the lethal injection and the other attending prison personnel is much closer to $3,000 than $308 million.

Legal Process

What has cost the state’s taxpayers hundreds of millions of dollars since 1978, when California reinstated the death penalty, is the labyrinthine legal process of actually carrying out an execution.

Indeed, the state’s anti-death penalty minority has thoroughly corrupted the process using every conceivable delaying tactic to prevent the state’s convicted killers from getting what’s coming to them.

That’s why only 13 death row inmates have been executed since 1978. Dividing 13 into the estimated $4 billion the state has spent over the past 33 years to maintain its death row brings the $308 million per execution figure Alarcon and Mitchell ginned up.

That’s why the murderer next in line for lethal injection — Alfred Greenwood Tweedle, who raped and strangled to death a 15-year old Riverside girl — has spent more than 20 years waiting for his death sentence to be carried out.

It’s not the juries that have sent murderers like Tweedle to death row that have cost the state the hundreds of millions of dollars. It’s the abolitionist lawyers who file appeal after specious appeal to nullify the juries’ death sentences.

It’s the activist judges — state and federal — that refuse to accept that capital punishment is the will of the people of California, and that its constitutionally has been upheld by the highest court in the land.

Real Reform

The way to end that mockery of justice is not to abolish the death penalty in California, but to reform the state’s dysfunctional death penalty appeals process.

In fact, such a reform was proposed three years ago by the state Supreme Court. It recommended a state constitutional amendment permitting death penalty appeals to be heard by state appeals courts, rather than the current requirement that all appeals be heard exclusively by the state’s highest court.

Because there would be a considerably larger pool of jurists working on capital cases — whereas, now, that work falls entirely on the state Supreme Court’s seven justices — the cases “could be heard more quickly and be completed sooner,” former Chief Justice Ronald George explained, “even with subsequent Supreme Court review.”

Justice for the state’s death row population would be more swiftly and surely served. And Sen. Hancock and other death penalty foes could no longer claim that is an expensive failure.

— Joseph Perkins