This weekend will feature the first meeting of the World Coalition Against the Death Penalty on U.S. soil, and, to my delight, this will happen at Hastings. The program seems very interesting. If you have interest in the topic, the first day, Saturday, June 12, will be open to the public. It’ll be delightful to see you there; if you see me and read the blog, do come by and say hi.
County-By-County Death Penalty Expenditures
Jonathan Simon, over at Governing Through Crime, directed my attention to this excellent feature of the ACLU death penalty report – an interactive map that allows you to track down how much resources have been spent on the death penalty in each county. San Francisco County, I’m proud and happy to report, has not sent anyone to death row since 2,000. But other counties certainly have. I encourage you to play with the map a bit and learn more about the variation – re our discussion of killer counties earlier this month.
Killer Counties: Los Angeles, Orange and Riverside
The ACLU’s new report, Death in Decline ’09, provides a mix of good and bad news.
The tide is turning in the United States from death sentences to permanent imprisonment. A growing number of states are choosing permanent imprisonment over the death penalty, fueled by growing concerns about the wrongful conviction of innocent people and the high costs of the death penalty in comparison to permanent imprisonment. In 2009, the number of new death sentences nationwide reached the lowest level since the death penalty was reinstated in 1976. California lags behind in this national trend. The Golden State sent more people to death row last year than in the seven preceding years. By the close of 2009, California’s death row was the largest and most costly in the United States. But the aggressive pursuit of the death penalty in California is limited to a few “Killer Counties.” In fact, nearly all of California’s 58 counties have, in practice, replaced the death penalty with permanent imprisonment, mirroring the nationwide trends. Only three counties—Los Angeles, Orange and Riverside—accounted for 83% of death sentences in 2009. Together, these “Killer Counties” sentenced more people to die in 2009 than did the entire state each year from 2002 to 2008. The increase in death sentences in 2009 was most stark in Los Angeles County. With 13 death sentences, Los Angeles County sent more people to death row in 2009 than any year this decade—more than the entire state of Texas for the same period—making Los Angeles the leading death penalty county in the country.
While the report focuses, among other issues, on the racial trends of these recent death sentences, and particularly, the overrepresentation of Latinos, it also puts a humonetarian spin on it, mentioning the fact that California’s financial situation should make this countertrend a cause for concern.
The Role of Cost in Anti-Death-Penalty Rhetoric
Elsewhere, we discussed the recent moratoria on executions, as well as ALI’s retraction of support for the death penalty and its abolition in New Mexico. These trends are undoubtedly linked to the financial crisis. Today’s question–and maybe our readers have some thoughts on this–is whether anti-death-penalty activists are making the most of the scarcity-related genre of arguments against the death penalty. There seems to be some evidence that they are.
Broadly speaking, we can classify anti-death-penalty arguments into three groups:
- Value concerns: this is a broad family of arguments, which include not only the broad issue of the appropriateness of the state’s killing of its own citizens, but also doubts about its deterrent effect, as well as concerns about the inequities associated with the death penalty (such as the overrepresentation of minorities);
- Innocence concerns: featuring cases of wrongful convictions and executions, the death penalty’s irreversibility plays an important part.
- Cost concerns.
There’s hardly any doubt that cost-related concerns figure prominently in the discourse nowadays. Mike Farrell’s post this weekend on The Huffington Post places particular emphasis on the cost argument. The Death Penalty Information Center also seems to highlight this argument in their publications. What I don’t know, and would very much like to find out, is whether this is a new phenomenon, generated by the financial crisis, or whether previous installments of the death penalty debate also featured cost-related arguments. My (unproven) hypothesis is that there would be evidence of all three arguments throughout the debate, but that the focus of the debate has shifted from value concerns (which were always discussed) to innocence concerns (whose importance probably increased with the introduction of DNA testing) to cost concerns. I guess the way to figure this out is to go back to activist literature from before the 1970s and spend some time “counting” reasons in articles. Your thoughts on this, as well as on the effectiveness of cost-related arguments in this debate, are welcome.
ACLU Post on Death Penalty Costs
Tying in some loose ends from the ALI retreat from supporting the death penalty and from the Governor’s “State of the State” address, the ACLU blog posts today about the potential of cutting correctional costs by abolishing the death penalty.
Housing for just one person on death row costs $90,000 more per year than housing in the general prison population (itself a hefty $50,000 a year). That means we are now paying an extra $63 million a year for death row housing. If the governor acted right now to convert all death sentences to permanent imprisonment, he could cut that much from the corrections’ budget today. Plus, we wouldn’t have to spend $400 million to build a new, expanded death row. And we would save millions more in legal fees.
ALI Abandons their Support of the Death Penalty
The American Law Institute has decided to give up their death penalty work. The New York Times reports:
The institute’s recent decision to abandon the field was a compromise. Some members had asked the institute to take a stand against the death penalty as such. That effort failed. Instead, the institute voted in October to disavow the structure it had created “in light of the current intractable institutional and structural obstacles to ensuring a minimally adequate system for administering capital punishment.”
That last sentence contains some pretty dense lawyer talk, but it can be untangled. What the institute was saying is that the capital justice system in the United States is irretrievably broken.
A study commissioned by the institute said that decades of experience had proved that the system could not reconcile the twin goals of individualized decisions about who should be executed and systemic fairness. It added that capital punishment was plagued by racial disparities; was enormously expensive even as many defense lawyers were underpaid and some were incompetent; risked executing innocent people; and was undermined by the politics that come with judicial elections.
Roger S. Clark, who teaches at the Rutgers School of Law in Camden, N.J., and was one of the leaders of the movement to have the institute condemn the death penalty outright, said he was satisfied with the compromise. “Capital punishment is going to be around for a while,” Professor Clark said. “What this does is pull the plug on the whole intellectual underpinnings for it.”
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Props to Michele Armstrong and Charles Cameron for the link.
Death Row Expansion Halted!
California Treasurer Bill Lockyer is halting the issuance of bonds to pay for the Death Row expansion endorsed earlier this year by Governor Schwarzenegger. The delay is due to the efforts of Assemblyman Jared Huffman and Senator Mark Leno. The Marin Independent Journal reports:
Huffman and Leno. . . sent a letter to Lockyer on Wednesday asserting that sale of the bonds would be illegal until resolution of litigation challenging Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s veto of budget language on conditions for financing of the project.
The language prohibited issuance of bonds until the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation determined that it could lawfully double-cell condemned inmates; federal court litigation on prison overcrowding currently before a three-judge panel was resolved; and the correction department completed California Environmental Quality Act analyses for any modifications to the project.
Huffman said the governor had no authority to use the line-item veto on policy language.
This delay may be good news for death penalty activists, but its long term impact on the death penalty will depend, to a large extent, on the next administration and on the 2010 elections.
Schwarzenegger Gives Go-Ahead to New Death Row
Execution chamber phones photo courtesy cdcr.ca.gov
Yes, you have read correctly. As the Chron reports this morning, while Governor Schwarzenegger makes more cuts to the legislative budget, he also approves the plan to rebuild Death Row, a project with an estimated cost of $356 million dollars, with a suspected $39 million dollar overrun. Some more details:
Without double-celling, the auditor’s report said, the new Death Row will be filled to capacity in 2014. But the report said double-celling raises concerns of safety and privacy, and that a survey found that only one other state, Oklahoma, double-cells condemned prisoners.
The budget that legislators sent to Schwarzenegger would have prohibited construction of the new Death Row until the state determined, in a court ruling or a formal opinion from the attorney general, that it would be allowed to double-cell Death Row inmates.
Another budget provision would have blocked the project until the state resolved a lawsuit over prison overcrowding. The suit is pending before a panel of three federal judges in San Francisco, who have ruled that overcrowding is the chief cause of poor health care in state prisons.
We have blogged about the Death Row project before. Conditions in Death Row have only recently reached constitutional threshold. Several states, citing costs, have abolished the death penalty or set moratoria on it. Quite an assortment of commentators, from Jonathan Simon to Republican lawmaker Tom Harman, have pointed out (for different reasons) the need to abolish the death penalty; the ACLU has pointed to its costs as only one of many reasons why abolition is long overdue. What can I say? To say I think pouring more money into this particular form of punishment, rather than doing away with it, is a bad decision, is the understatement of the year.
More Death Penalty Humonetarianism
More bipartisan disgruntlement about the death penalty, fueled by its dysfunctions and discontents: yesterday’s Chron featured an op-ed from Republican lawmaker Tom Harman.
In 2008, the California Commission on the Fair Administration of Justice issued a report stating that the death penalty system in California was failing. In California, as of 2008, 30 inmates had been on Death Row for more than 25 years, 119 for more than 20 years and 240 for more than 15 years. Is California doing something wrong? Absolutely.
Delays in obtaining legal counsel, the appeals process, court-ordered moratoriums and other stalling tactics are routine. These delays ultimately place more value on the life of a convicted criminal than on that of the victim. I believe this is unacceptable to the victims, their families and the voters.
The sad truth in California is that killers on Death Row are far more likely to die of natural causes than at the hands of the state. As the commission noted, the interminable delays that have become the hallmark of the system have weakened the death penalty’s effect on deterring crime.
Harman is a staunch believer in the death penalty, and so his contribution to the debate is particularly interesting. It is also timely, considering the upcoming public hearing on the lethal injection and the Day of Action on June 30th. Here’s Jonathan Simon’s take on this. And here’s another example of this interesting trend.
Event: Day of Action to End the Death Penalty
Death Penalty Focus is organizing a Day of Action to end the death penalty on June 30, 2009. The date is scheduled to coincide with the public hearing regarding the reformed execution proceedings using lethal injection, which we reported about here.
In keeping with the financial crisis and humonetarianism themes, here’s the ACLU of Northern California report on the costs of the death penalty and the potential savings that might result from its abolition, which we discussed here, here and here.