Is California Next?
New York's recent decision to kill the death penalty is likely to have an impact on other state's capital justice systems. Will California follow suit?
Read this Los Angeles Times editorial
None of the 32 murderers sentenced to death in New York has been executed in the decade since the state reinstated capital punishment. Yet last week, the gnawing concerns of state lawmakers, including some who voted for the 1995 law, prompted them to effectively kill the death penalty for this year, and perhaps longer.Many Californians, lawmakers as well as voters, share those concerns about fairness and fallibility. They worry as well about the inequalities that riddle the death penalty in a state as large and diverse as ours.
Death penalty foes predict that the de facto moratorium the New York state Assembly imposed will "ripple" to other states. California should be next.
This state has the nation's largest death row, with 640 inmates. So large, in fact, that taxpayers pony up $114 million every year to house them at San Quentin, on top of the extra costs to prosecute them and provide for required appeals. The state's condemned population is so large in part because voters and lawmakers have allowed prosecutors to seek death sentences in more circumstances than allowed in most other states.
Posted by beth at 11:40 AM
