Tag Archives: death row

Uncategorized

California Ignores Obvious Budget Solution: Cut the Death Penalty

California’s new governor Jerry Brown confronted the state’s dire budget crisis this week when he released his budget proposal. True to his word, the proposal contains hard cuts to social services across the board, ensuring that California’s most vulnerable will have an even tougher time staying healthy and making ends meet.

He was slightly less true to his word, though, when it came to his oft-repeated slogan that "everything is on the table." At least one overfunded, broken government program was allowed to keep its bloated budget without a single cut: the state’s billion-dollar death penalty.

Did the governor miss this massive drain on funds, or is there a sacred cow in California’s budget after all?  Maybe he can be excused on the grounds that there’s no "death penalty" line item anywhere in the budget. But, of course, the reason there’s no "death penalty" line item is that the $1 billion the death penalty will cost over the next five years is hidden throughout a half-dozen judicial and corrections budget items — any one of which could be trimmed by the governor. Let’s go down the line:

  • There’s the $1 million per death penalty trial over and above the cost of non-death penalty murder trials, which comes from county prosecutors’ budgets.
  • Then there’s the $63 million per year extra spent housing people on death row and another $60 million spent on their appeals, again over and above the cost of housing and appeals for life without parole. Those costs are tucked away in the budgets for corrections, the Supreme Court, the attorney general’s office and public defense.
  • Finally, the kicker is the brand new death row facility we’re about to build that will cost $400 million.

Over five years, that tally comes to just over $1 billion.

Now, repealing the death penalty in California can only be done at the ballot box, but defunding the whole system can be done with a few strokes of the governor’s pen: just ask any senior citizen, recipient of in-home medical care, or single working parent. They’ll tell you how powerful that pen can be when it comes to cutting government programs.

Alternatively, if the governor converted the sentences of California’s more than 700 residents of death row to life without parole, he’d save that whole billion dollars in one swoop: no more extra housing costs, no more extra appeals costs, no more new death row. That’s a lot of money that could go towards much-needed programs and services.

And it’s not as if the people of the state are clamoring for more death penalty spending over other issues, like, education, crime prevention, health care, or social safety nets. While Gov. Brown may have assumed that the death penalty really is precious to California voters, his own election proved otherwise. Even after Meg Whitman saturated the airwaves bashing Brown for his anti-death penalty record, Californians still elected the guy. We also voted down a Senate candidate who campaigned on being pro-death penalty, and elected an anti-death penalty attorney general, Kamala Harris, over a prosecutor known nationwide for his aggressive pursuit of death sentences.

Why did we vote in Jerry Brown again? Maybe we’re ready for some realistic and pragmatic change. Maybe we’re ready to prioritize victims, community safety, and health above executions. Maybe we’re ready to Cut This. Send Gov. Brown a message that if he’s going to cut anything from California’s budget, he should cut the death penalty.

Uncategorized

How Would You Spend $64 Million?

By James Clark, Death Penalty Field Organizer, ACLU of Southern California

Remember that episode of The Simpsons where Homer is so broke he breaks into his daughter’s piggy bank, only to find it full of IOUs from himself?

On Wednesday, that scene was reenacted in Sacramento, with Gov. Schwarzenegger playing the role of Homer. The governor announced that he would be "borrowing" $64 million from the General Fund in order to move forward with one of his pet projects, the construction of a new death row facility at San Quentin. And $64 million is just the tip of the iceberg. Altogether, the new facility is expected to total upwards of $400 million. That’s half a million dollars per prison cell — roughly the cost of a nice house in California.

Of course, the General Fund is virtually broke already, so our governor is borrowing against nonexistent budget. And didn’t Gov. Schwarzenegger threaten that he wouldn’t sign a budget at all? Every government agency in the state is in fiscal emergency, our social safety net is in tatters, and the state is weeks away from paying state employees with IOUs.

Which is why building a new death row is exactly what we don’t need need right now.

California has by far the largest and most costly death row in the country, with over 700 inmates, nearly double the closest runner-up. All of these inmates live in a prison that predates the Civil War. And its resident population keeps climbing: Some California counties are sending even more inmates to death row, ignoring the fact that nearly everyone on California’s death row dies of natural causes, just like people sentenced to life without parole. Last year, California sentenced more people to death than any state in the country, with Los Angeles County alone sending more people to death row than the entire state of Texas.

Those death sentences come with a steep price tag. Each one costs at least $1.1 million more than a trial seeking permanent imprisonment. But that’s just the trial cost for each death penalty prosecution paid by the county. The cost for the entire death penalty system — paid by the state’s General Fund — only mounts from there. With constitutionally-mandated appeals, housing, and upkeep on our current dilapidated death row facility, the annual cost of California’s death penalty is $126 million per year.

Plus, there’s that new death row facility at $400 million. All told, that’s $1 billion in five years.

That’s the amount the governor could save California’s taxpayers if he would cut the death penalty and convert all of those costly death sentences to permanent imprisonment. All without releasing a single prisoner and ensuring swift and certain justice for murder victims and their families. Permanent imprisonment saves money, saves time, and avoids the decades of turmoil from drawn out death-penalty appeals.

So where would you like to see Gov. Schwarzenegger spend that $64 million from the California budget, instead of building a new death-row facility? Post your ideas in the comments section, then Tweet the governor and tell him how he should spend it! Tweet @Schwarzenegger Say No to Death Row! Spend #64million on [insert your preferred state program] #cabudget.

Budget

Let’s Cut the Death Penalty and Save California $126 Million a Year

By Ramona Ripston, Executive Director, ACLU of Southern California

The California Supreme Court has just ‘sentenced’ our state’s taxpayers to an additional debt of at least $180,000 more per year. How? The state’s high court upheld the death penalty in two cases.

Imposing the death penalty adds enormously to the cost of prosecution and permanent lifetime housing for an inmate. The death penalty is certainly a polarizing public policy issue, but I wonder how many people realize that it’s also a vortex-like drain on their own pocketbooks.

Whether you’re for or against the death penalty, you are paying for it. Here are the staggering numbers, from a report by the ACLU of Northern California:

  • $90,000 a year: taxpayers’ extra cost of holding one inmate on death row, over and above the cost of keeping an inmate in the general prison population
  • $10.9 million: taxpayers’ cost of one death penalty trial, based on the records of a sample of trials
  • $117 million a year: taxpayers’ cost of seeking execution, after conviction, for inmates throughout the state

Altogether, Californians spend as much per year in pursuit of executions as the salaries of more than 2,500 experienced teachers, or 2,250 new California Highway Patrol officers.

Why are we putting our cash-strapped state and county governments, and ourselves, through this? The ACLU of Northern California’s county-by-county comparison, Death by Geography, found that counties that sentencing people to death do not experience lower homicide rates or raise rates of solving homicides.

Instead of California cutting $50 million from the fund for victims of violent crime, as the legislature and governor did last year, the ACLU California affiliates suggest the state cut its expensive death penalty. Instead of cutting programs emphasizing education, rehabilitation and addiction treatment, cut the death penalty. The state would save $1 billion over five years without releasing a single prisoner, including $400 million that would be saved by eliminating a new facility planned for death row inmates. Thousands of budget-minded Californians have joined our CUT THIS campaign.

As I testified to the Californian Commission on the Fair Administration of Justice in 2008: "California’s death penalty system is arbitrary, biased, expensive and susceptible to fatal error. It cannot be fixed. It should not be tinkered with. It should be ended."

Prisons

California’s Failing Death Penalty

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This should come as no surprise to Calitics readers, who have been treated to a steady diet of articles on the flaws with our prison system. In a system with too many prisoners and too few funds to properly accommodate them and their legal processes, those combined factors mean that the death penalty system is on the verge of collapse, according to a state commission report released today:

The commission did not advocate abolishing the death penalty but did note that California could save $100 million a year if the state replaced the punishment with sentences of life in prison without possibility of parole. Death row prisoners cost more to confine, are granted more resources for appeals, have more expensive trials and usually die in prison anyway, the commission said in its 117-page report….

Among the panel’s findings:

* Seventy-nine death row inmates have not obtained lawyers to handle their first appeals, which are by law automatic, and 291 inmates lack lawyers to bring constitutional challenges based on facts that the trial courts did not hear. It takes inmates an average of 12 years to obtain a state high court ruling on their first appeals.

* The California Supreme Court has such a backlog that only one appeal from a conviction after 1997 has been resolved.

* California does not meet the federal standard for paying private lawyers to handle death cases, and the state’s method of paying these attorneys — sometimes with flat-fee contracts — violates American Bar Assn. standards.

The problems facing the state’s administration of the death penalty stem from the same causes as the broader prisons crisis. California voters and politicians embraced “tough on crime” policies in the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s but neglected to properly fund the system, which has grown like a cancer on our budget. It’s never difficult for politicians to propose new crimes or higher sentences, but these same legislators – like the Runners – also work to cut the state’s taxing ability, putting California on a collision course with both the federal courts and common sense. Either we fund the system properly, or pursue saner correctional policies.

The report’s authors did not agree on solutions. Natasha Minsker, head of death penalty policy for the ACLU of Northern California, argues that since there’s no money to improve the system, we should turn to life imprisonment instead of putting so many people on death row:

Considering California’s fiscal crisis, spending all of this money is not only unlikely, it’s impossible….

Few people realize that condemning someone to permanent imprisonment costs California taxpayers millions of dollars less than sentencing him or her to death. We have had the option of permanent imprisonment for as long as we have had the death penalty, and it’s proven itself to be a more functional system that serves as a severe, but cost effective, punishment.

Which brings us to our third option, according to the Commission: replace the death penalty with permanent imprisonment until death, and save millions of dollars for public safety programs that actually work to punish criminals, protect the public and help victims. This would cost us less than $12 million, a savings of more than $200 million a year over option one.

The report itself notes that most death row inmates die before they can be executed anyway, rendering the whole process somewhat pointless. Combined with the racial biases that Minsker describes in her article but that the report did not closely examine, and the fiscal issues involved, it seems sensible from a public policy standpoint to eliminate the death penalty and embrace the life imprisonment option.

It’s clear that California’s correctional policies are totally unsustainable. But with a broken political system and a lack of leadership from either party on fixing it, it seems unlikely we’re going to get any real solutions anytime soon.