By Julia Cheever
June 30, 2008
A commission created by the California Senate four years ago released a report today saying the state’s death penalty system is broken and “close to collapse.”
The California Commission on the Fair Administration of Justice said the state’s death row of 670 inmates is the largest in the nation and that appeals take 20 to 25 years to resolve, compared with a national average of 12 years.
The Sacramento-based commission said problems in the system include excessive delay in the appointment of appeal lawyers and a severe backlog in appeals pending before the California Supreme Court.
California has executed 13 prisoners since the death penalty was reinstated in the state in 1978.
The report said, “The backlog is now so severe that California would have to execute five prisoners per month for the next 12 years just to carry out the sentences of those currently on death row.”
The commission said repairing the current system would take $95 million per year in additional funding for state-paid, court-appointed appeal lawyers for indigent inmates.
It also recommended serious consideration of a proposal by Chief Justice Ronald George to reduce the backlog by having some death penalty appeals considered by intermediate state appeals courts.
At present, under the state constitution, death penalty verdicts are initially appealed directly to the California Supreme Court. After that, inmates can file further challenges through habeas corpus petitions in the state high court and in federal courts.
The commission additionally suggested, without recommending, that other options could be to narrow the number of special circumstances that could lead to capital punishment or to abolish death penalties and replace them with life sentences.
The solutions “are ultimately choices that must be made by the California electorate,” the commission said.
Stefanie Faucher, program director of San Francisco-based Death Penalty Focus, a group opposed to capital punishment, said the report shows that pursuing death sentences is excessively costly.
“The time has come to replace our wasteful death penalty with permanent imprisonment and to invest in solving unsolved murders,” Faucher said.
But Michael Rushford, president of the Sacramento-based Criminal Justice Legal Foundation, a victims’ rights group, said the report was “predictable” and was unbalanced because of what he alleged was an anti-death-penalty bias on the commission.
Rushford said the system could be improved for far less than the estimated $95 million by assigning appeal lawyers from the State Public Defender’s office and reducing the number of appeals inmates can file.
The report was the 10th and final report by the commission, which will expire on Tuesday. The commission chair was former state Attorney General John Van De Kamp and its executive director was University of Santa Clara law professor Gerald Uelmen.
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