(CN) — As nearly 700 condemned California prisoners wait in limbo under a death penalty process halted by the governor, a key criminal justice panel on Wednesday recommended making the state’s temporary freeze on executions permanent.
The Committee on Revision of the Penal Code, a seven-member board formed by the state Legislature last year to propose criminal justice reforms, released a 39-page report recommending that capital punishment be repealed in the Golden State.
“More than forty years of experience have shown that the death penalty is the opposite of a simple and rational scheme,” the report states. “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 constitutional.”
Poring through data on death sentences imposed and carried out since capital punishment was reinstated in California in 1978, the panel concluded the post-conviction litigation process has become “almost unfathomably long and costly.”
The report cites staggering racial disparities in who gets sentenced to death, with people of color making up 68% of those on death row in California. It further notes that about a third of condemned prisoners suffer from mental illness, according to figures cited in a federal class action over mental health care in California prisons.
Additionally, the report highlights that innocent people are sometimes executed. It describes how 185 prisoners sentenced to death across the U.S. were later exonerated, including five formerly condemned prisoners in California.
Despite those criticisms, voters have opted to keep the death penalty legal in California twice in the last decade. In 2012, a proposal to abolish the death penalty was defeated by 52% of the vote. In 2016, voters narrowly rejected another proposal to end capital punishment and passed a measure to speed up executions with 51% approval. The accelerated execution law was largely upheld by the California Supreme Court in 2017.
In March 2019, California Governor Gavin Newsom enacted a moratorium on executions, citing his belief that capital punishment is morally wrong.
San Mateo County District Attorney Steve Wagstaffe is one of three county prosecutors who sought to intervene in a federal lawsuit over California’s lethal injection protocols to uphold Proposition 66, the 2016 ballot measure that sped up executions.
In a phone interview Wednesday, Wagstaffe said he takes no position on whether the death penalty should be repealed in California, but as long as it’s on the books, he said the law should be defended and that his office will enforce it.
“If it is the law, then my duty is to uphold the law,” Wagstaffe said. “But if they change the law, that’s what democracy is all about.”
Wagstaffe, who has served as DA in San Mateo County since 2011, said he hopes his county never experiences an atrocity like the Oklahoma City bombing, but if someone were to carry out such an act, he would consider seeking the death penalty under those circumstances.
“I still think there are certain cases where I would want to bring it to a jury and let the jury decide if that’s an appropriate punishment,” Wagstaffe said.
Last year, four progressive prosecutors from San Francisco, Los Angeles, Contra Costa County and San Joaquin County formed a group called the Prosecutors Alliance of California to advocate for criminal justice reform efforts, such as ending capital punishment.
The group’s executive director, Cristine Soto DeBerry, said in a phone interview Wednesday that she supports the panel’s recommendation to repeal the death penalty.
DeBerry pointed to studies showing that capital punishment doesn’t provide effective deterrence against murder and that the process is extremely expensive and prolonged in California.
“We’d be wiser to use the resources that support the death penalty to support victims and prevent violent crime from happening in the first place,” DeBerry said.
Across the nation, 23 states and the District of Columbia have abolished the death penalty. Three states, including California, have moratoriums that have temporarily halted executions. In July, the Biden administration also imposed a temporary stay on federal executions, reversing the prior Trump administration policy.
In its report, the panel acknowledged that ending capital punishment in California “is a difficult goal” so it laid out several recommended steps that can be taken in the interim. Those steps include having the governor grant clemency to commute death sentences, having the attorney general settle pending legal challenges against death sentences and having county district attorneys recall death penalty cases for resentencing.
The report also recommends legislative reforms, including changing a law that allows accomplices who did not personally kill someone but took part in a felony that involves murder to be sentenced to death. It also suggests state lawmakers make retroactive a 2020 state law that bans convictions based on race, give judges more discretion to dismiss enhancements in death penalty cases and create a process to remove prisoners deemed permanently mentally incompetent from death row.
Governor Newsom's office did not respond to a request for comment Wednesday.
A spokesperson for California Attorney General Rob Bonta, who has publicly declared his opposition to capital punishment, said, "We look forward to reviewing the report and continuing to engage with the committee in its important work on behalf of the State of California."
Members of the Committee on Revision of the Penal Code include chairman Michael Romano of Stanford Law School, Assembly member Alex Lee of San Jose, state Senator Nancy Skinner of Berkeley, retired Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Peter Espinoza, retired U.S. District Judge Thelton Henderson, retired California Supreme Court Justice Carlos Moreno and professor Priscilla Ocen of Loyola Law School in Los Angeles.
The state currently has 697 inmates on death row. California has carried out 13 executions since the death penalty was reinstated in 1978. The most recent execution of Clarence Ray Allen took place in 2006.
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