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Thread: Californians for Death Penalty Reform & Savings

  1. #11
    Administrator Moh's Avatar
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    Cal. Voters Will Choose Whether to Mend or End Death Penalty

    By Kent Scheidegger

    In 2012, the friends of murderers came within four percent of repealing California's death penalty by popular vote, something that has not been done in any state in the United States. Opposition to the death penalty (like other soft-on-crime efforts) is mostly an elitist cause, pushed by affluent people who can go home to their leafy neighborhoods while the bloody consequences of their feel-good "humanitarianism" fall on people of more modest means. Thus, repeal bills have gotten through legislatures even when the people of the state are opposed to repeal. We saw this in Connecticut, where repeal went through even as polls showed the people opposed by 2-1.

    In California, the death penalty was enacted by initiative and can't be repealed by the Legislature. However, the Legislature has failed to do the maintenance necessary to make the death penalty effective, and until now the forces of justice have not been able to raise the very large amounts of money needed to get a fix-it initiative on the ballot.

    I can easily see why a lot of people who support the death penalty in principle voted for repeal in 2012. The present system is not working. If I genuinely believed it was not fixable, I might vote for repeal myself.

    The well-funded friends of murderers have enough signatures to put repeal on the ballot again this year. But this year is different. Through a herculean fund-raising effort led by the district attorneys, there will also be a competing initiative to actually fix the system, making the reforms that our derelict Legislature has killed instead of passing so many times.

    "Mend it, don't end it" was our slogan in opposition to repeal last time. A good many people asked, "Yeah, but when are you going to mend it." Finally, we have a good answer. This time, the people of California have a direct choice between the two. The status quo is toast.

    I have no doubt the people will choose to mend it and not end it if they are fully and honestly informed of the choice before them. The main concern now is the overwhelming funding advantage the opponents have. They can and will spend big bucks to put misleading advertisements on the air, and our side will have only a shoestring grass-roots campaign. This campaign may be a test of the extent to which money can buy an election.

    Here is the campaign's press release:


    FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE Contact: Rachel Smith
    May 19, 2016 949-241-9785

    California Death Penalty Reform Proponents Submit Signatures to Qualify for November Ballot

    SACRAMENTO, Calif., May 19, 2016 - The Californians for Death Penalty Reform and Savings campaign submitted 593,000 total signatures across the state's 58 counties today to qualify the initiative for the November ballot.

    California currently requires 365,880 valid signatures to qualify a statutory ballot measure.

    Press conferences are being held today in ten major cities throughout the state with remarks from local District Attorneys, law enforcement officials, crime victim advocates, and community leaders.

    The Death Penalty Reform and Savings Act seeks to reform California's death penalty laws so they can be fairly and appropriately applied in the most heinous of crimes. The initiative will help keep Californians safe and ensure justice for murdered victims and their families. At the same time, the measure will save taxpayers millions of dollars per year while maintaining due process protections for those sentenced to death.

    The initiative's proponent, former NFL player Kermit Alexander, will speak this afternoon in Riverside about his thirty-year effort to seek justice for his mother, sister and two nephews who were murdered in 1984.

    "Justice is not easy, and it is certainly not gentle. But justice denied is not justice," says Alexander.

    "We the people of California have consecutively and systematically voted to reinstate and preserve the use of capital punishment despite the efforts of those who refuse to carry out an execution."

    Death row inmates have murdered over 1000 victims, including 226 children and 43 police officers; 294 victims were raped and/or tortured before being killed. California's death row includes serial killers, cop killers, child killers, mass murderers, and hate crime killers.

    The California Death Penalty Reform and Savings Act of 2016 was introduced on October 20, 2015 and will ensure justice for both victims and defendants by:

    • Expanding the pool of available defense attorneys so death penalty appeals can proceed quickly.

    • Requiring that a defendant who is sentenced to death is appointed a lawyer at the time of sentence, rather than waiting for years just to get a lawyer.

    • Allowing the Department of Corrections to house condemned inmates in less costly housing with fewer special privileges while still maintaining strong security.

    • Requiring that condemned inmates work and pay restitution to victims.

    • Allowing the Department of Corrections to enact an execution protocol without having to reply to every question or suggestion by any citizen who sends them a letter.

    • Giving the California Supreme Court oversight over the state agency that manages death penalty appeals.

    Statewide co-chair of the Californians for Death Penalty Reform and Savings, Sacramento County District Attorney Anne Marie Schubert, thanked all the volunteers and donors who made the signature drive possible, saying:

    "We gathered nearly 600,000 signatures in a very challenging petition environment, and we could not have done it without thousands of hours from dedicated volunteers around the state, as well as generous financial backing from so many supporters. From the support we received from law enforcement officers, prosecutors, and probation officers through their associations; to the generous gift from victims' advocate and Broadcom co-founder, Dr. Henry T. Nicholas, our largest individual donor; to the $5 gift from a retired supporter who could afford not even that; this effort was the result of so many supporters who dug deep. We thank them all."

    Each County will transmit a raw count of signatures to the California Secretary of State and then proceed to verify either a full count of signatures in their county or a random sample.

    For stories about victims and current death row inmates, please visit:

    http://www.deathpenaltyreform.com/dealthpenalty-12pg/

    www.deathpenaltyreform.com

    For more information on the press conferences and speakers, contact Rachel Smith.

    http://www.crimeandconsequences.com/...ther.html#more

  2. #12
    Administrator Helen's Avatar
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    Opinion:

    Save the death penalty. No on Prop. 62

    By Debra J. Saunders
    sfgate.com

    Opponents of California’s death penalty have been highly successful at thwarting executions since the state resumed executions in 1992 after a 20-year hiatus. Their latest ploy is Proposition 62, which would repeal the death penalty and re-sentence Death Row inmates to life without parole. Measure sponsors argue that capital punishment presents the risk of executing an innocent person, but also state California’s death penalty is “simply unworkable.”

    That’s a cheeky stand, coming from the corner that has been throwing monkey wrenches into the criminal justice system to subvert death penalty law. Over the years, appellate attorneys have introduced endless time-sucking, frivolous appeals that have jammed the courts, largely on technical grounds that have nothing to do with guilt or innocence, e.g., the trial lawyer wasn’t top drawer; the defendant’s parents were abusive; lethal injection may not be 100 percent painless.

    In 2006, lawyers argued that convicted torture-murderer Michael Morales might feel pain in his last moments because of the state’s three-drug lethal-injection protocol. A federal judge granted their appeal and effectively froze the capital punishment pipeline for a decade.

    Gov. Jerry Brown had pledged to implement the death penalty, even though he personally opposes it. Yet his corrections department was happy to sit back and let the law not work for years. In exasperation, the tough-on-crime Criminal Justice Legal Foundation filed a lawsuit on behalf of the families of murder victims of two Death Row inmates to prod the state to develop a drug protocol that should pass muster with the U.S. Supreme Court.

    State Attorney General Kamala Harris, who also said she would uphold California’s law despite her personal objections, tried to block the suit on the dubious grounds that the victims’ families “lack standing.” She failed. The families won. Sacramento finally devised a one-drug protocol, which should go into effect after a vetting period expected to end soon.

    So now, just as the obstructionists are about to run out of string, they have put a measure on the November ballot to end California’s death penalty.

    Opponent Matt Cherry of Death Penalty Focus told The Chronicle editorial board that capital punishment “has failed in California.” Since 1992, he added, “Just 13 people have been executed,” which he noted constitutes about 1 percent of the 930 individuals sentenced to death since 1978. It’s like an extorting mobster telling an honest businessman that it no longer pays to work hard and follow the rules. You might as well just toss him the keys to the shop and save yourself some heartache.

    In their ballot argument, Prop. 62 supporters warn that when executions resume, California risks executing an innocent person — like Carlos DeLuna who was executed in 1989 before an “independent investigation later proved his innocence.” Problem:

    Texas executed DeLuna. Prop. 62’s backers can’t name an exonerated individual from California’s post-1978 Death Row because there aren’t any.

    In 2012, I asked Brown if he had considered appointing a panel to recommend Death Row inmates deserving of a commutation. Brown personally remains a death penalty opponent, so his answer is instructive: “As attorney general, I think the representation was good. I think people have gotten exquisite due process in the state of California. It goes on for 20 or 25 years and to think that they’ve missed anything like they have in some other states, I have not seen any evidence of it. None. I know people say, ‘Oh, there have been all these innocent people.’ Well, I have not seen one name on Death Row that’s been told to me.”

    At a different editorial board meeting, former San Quentin State Prison Warden Jeanne Woodford, Ana Zamora of the No of 65 campaign and Berkeley law Professor Elisabeth Semel vigorously defended all of the hijinks played by anti-death-penalty lawyers. They oppose both the death penalty and Prop. 66, which is supposed to streamline executions.

    Why does it take a year to process an appeal based on a convicted killer’s childhood? Why doesn’t the Habeas Corpus Resource Center focus on worthy appeals and stop jamming up the courts with frivolous paper — and then complain about court backlogs? Why have opponents gone after the state for getting lethal injection drugs from compounding pharmacies or other states, after opponents made it impossible to secure drugs from once legal sources? The answer to everything: Defense attorneys have to do it, because “it’s the law.”

    http://www.sfgate.com/opinion/saunde...62-9185798.php
    "I realize this may sound harsh, but as a father and former lawman, I really don't care if it's by lethal injection, by the electric chair, firing squad, hanging, the guillotine or being fed to the lions."
    - Oklahoma Rep. Mike Christian

    "There are some people who just do not deserve to live,"
    - Rev. Richard Hawke

    “There are lots of extremely smug and self-satisfied people in what would be deemed lower down in society, who also deserve to be pulled up. In a proper free society, you should be allowed to make jokes about absolutely anything.”
    - Rowan Atkinson

  3. #13
    Administrator Helen's Avatar
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    Capital punishment serves a purpose

    By Jeff Jacoby
    The Boston Globe

    Writing in support of Proposition 62, a California ballot initiative to repeal the death penalty, former El Dorado county supervisor Ron Briggs makes the tiresomely familiar claim that “the death penalty does not make our communities any safer” and “is not a deterrent to crime.”

    For death penalty opponents, it is a venerable article of faith that executing murderers doesn’t deter other murders and that abolishing the death penalty doesn’t make killings more likely. Never mind that a thick sheaf of peer-reviewed academic studies refutes the abolitionists’ belief, as, of course, does common sense: All penalties have some deterrent effect, and the more severe the penalty, the more it deters. Let a parking meter expire, and you risk a $20 ticket; park in a handicapped spot, and risk a $200 ticket. Which violation are you less likely to commit?

    It doesn’t take a social-science degree to grasp the real-world difference between facing vs. not facing a potential death sentence. Criminals grasp it too.

    Dmitry Smirnov did. A resident of British Columbia, Smirnov was smitten with Jitka Vesel, a pretty Chicago woman he’d met online playing “World of Warcraft” in 2008 and then dated for several weeks. When Vesel ended the brief relationship, Smirnov took it badly. He returned to Canada, but kept pursuing Vesel by phone and online. When she broke off communication with him, he began plotting to kill her.

    Smirnov returned to the United States in 2011, bought a gun and ammunition, and drove back to Chicago. He attached a GPS device to Vesel’s car so he could track her movements. On the evening of April 13, he tailed her to the Czechoslovak Heritage Museum in Oak Park, Ill., where she was a curator and board member. When she came out after a meeting, Smirnov ambushed her. He shot her repeatedly, firing multiple rounds into the back of her head even after she had crumpled to the ground.

    A deranged suitor? Maybe — but Smirnov wasn’t too deranged to firstcheck out whether Illinois was a death penalty state. He headed back to Chicago to murder Vesel only after learning that Illinois had recently abolished capital punishment. When he was questioned afterward by police, according to prosecutors, he told them he had confirmed Illinois’ no-death penalty status “as recently as the morning of the murder.” In an e-mail sent to a friend after the fact, Smirnov — who voluntarily surrendered to the police — made clear that he knew what to expect. “Illinois doesn’t have the death penalty, so I’ll spend the rest of my life in prison,” he wrote.

    At trial Smirnov pleaded guilty, and was given a life sentence.

    Would Jitka Vesel be alive today if Smirnov had faced the death penalty? Obviously there is no way to know for sure. But we do know for sure that when the cost of a crime goes up, the frequency of that crime goes down. Raise the price of any behavior, and fewer people will do it. The deterrent power of punishment is axiomatic; criminal law would be meaningless without it.

    Still, a penalty cannot deter if it is never imposed. California hasn’t executed a murderer in 10 years. Only 13 killers have been put to death since 1972, when the state legalized capital punishment. Hundreds of savage murderers have been sentenced to death — there are currently 746 inmates on California’s death row — but endless legal appeals and procedures have made executions, for all intents and purposes, impossible.

    Most Californians understand that their state’s death penalty needs to be fixed, not abolished. Voters defeated a repeal initiative, Proposition 34, in 2012 and appear likely to do the same to Proposition 62, the new repeal measure, this November.

    According to a statewide poll released last week by the Institute of Governmental Studies at the University of California at Berkeley, voters oppose the new death penalty repeal measure by a 10-point margin, 55 percent to 45 percent.

    On the other hand, California voters strongly support a second death penalty measure that will also be on the November ballot. Proposition 66, as summarized by the San Francisco Chronicle, would “speed up executions by setting tight deadlines for court rulings, placing some limits on appeals, and requiring many more defense lawyers to take capital cases.” The UC Berkeley poll shows voters backing Proposition 66, with its mend-it-don’t-end-it approach, by an overwhelming 76-to-24 ratio.

    The politics of capital punishment are complicated and emotional, but human nature doesn’t change. Granted, incentives and disincentives are never foolproof. Granted, there will always be cases in which deterrents don’t deter. On the whole, however, when the death penalty is on the books and consistently enforced, a significant number of homicides will be prevented.

    Pretty much by definition, murders that don’t happen because criminals are deterred by the prospect of being executed can’t be systematically tallied. But felons often disclose their motives when asked. In a striking 1961 opinion, California Supreme Court

    Justice Marshall McComb plumbed the files of the Los Angeles Police Department to demonstrate the deterrent effect of the death penalty on the thinking of violent criminals.

    McComb listed numerous examples of homicides not committed because a would-be killer didn’t want to risk capital punishment. Among them:

    ■ Margaret Elizabeth Daly, arrested for attacking Pete Gibbons with a knife, who told the investigating officers: “Yeah, I cut him and I should have done a better job. I would have killed him but I didn’t want to go to the gas chamber.”

    ■ Orelius Mathew Steward, imprisoned for bank robbery, who acknowledged that he had considered shooting the unaccompanied cop who arrested him: “I could have blasted him. I thought about it at the time, but I changed my mind when I thought of the gas chamber.”

    ■ Paul Brusseau, convicted for a string of candy store holdups, which he committed while pretending to carry a gun. “Asked what his reason was for simulating a gun rather than using a real one, he replied that he did not want to get the gas chamber.”

    Criminals may be evil and pitiless, but criminality isn’t a synonym for stupidity. When murder is punished with death, fewer criminals will murder. When murder is punished with nothing worse than prison, more criminals will be emboldened to kill. In the never-ending debate over capital punishment, that is always what the choice comes down to.

    https://apps.bostonglobe.com/true-cr...al-punishment/
    "I realize this may sound harsh, but as a father and former lawman, I really don't care if it's by lethal injection, by the electric chair, firing squad, hanging, the guillotine or being fed to the lions."
    - Oklahoma Rep. Mike Christian

    "There are some people who just do not deserve to live,"
    - Rev. Richard Hawke

    “There are lots of extremely smug and self-satisfied people in what would be deemed lower down in society, who also deserve to be pulled up. In a proper free society, you should be allowed to make jokes about absolutely anything.”
    - Rowan Atkinson

  4. #14
    Senior Member CnCP Legend CharlesMartel's Avatar
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    California May Abolish the Death Penalty

    On Election Day, California voters will make a monumental moral and financial decision. Proposition 62 -- the Justice That Works Act -- is on the Nov. 8 ballot, and if the initiative passes, it will replace the death penalty with life in prison without parole. It will also require convicted murderers to work and pay restitution to their victims' families. And it will save taxpayers $150 million a year, according to the Legislative Analyst's Office.

    Among the states still part of the U.S. death penalty system, California has the most people on death row -- 746. Florida is next, with 388 according to the Yes on 62 campaign. Overall, 2,943 people are on death row in the United States (as of Jan. 1) -- meaning almost one in four people waiting to be executed are in the California penal system. The elderly make up 11 percent, and the oldest condemned inmate is 86. The average stay on death row is 18 years.

    Although California has spent about $5 billion administering the death penalty, it has executed just 13 people since 1978. This means taxpayers have spent about $384 million per execution.

    There is no evidence demonstrating that the death penalty deters crime, according to a 2012 National Academy of Sciences study. Capital punishment has been applied arbitrarily due to inherent bias, local political pressures on prosecutors and judges, and lack of access to quality defense attorneys by those convicted. According to Death Penalty Focus, the race of the victim and the race of the defendant are major determinants in who is sentenced to death in this country.

    According to the Death Penalty Information Center (DPIC), since 1973, 156 people sent to death row nationwide were later exonerated. A 2014 study conducted by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences concluded that 4.1 percent of all death row inmates are actually innocent. But the innocence rate is more than twice the rate of exoneration. That means an unknown number of innocent people have been or will be put to death. "Every time we have an execution, there is a risk of executing an innocent," said Richard Dieter, former executive director of the DPIC. "The risk may be small, but it's unacceptable."

    The United States has no uniform law on the death penalty. Each state is free to choose whether or not to execute people. Nineteen states have abolished the death penalty. The Inter-American Commission on Human Rights determined that this discrepancy violates the American Declaration of the Rights and Duties of Man, which the U.S. has signed.

    And look at the company we keep. Only China, Iran, Iraq and Saudi Arabia execute more people than the United States.

    Comparing Proposition 62 and Proposition 66

    California voters will be confronted with two competing death penalty propositions on the November ballot.

    Whereas Proposition 62 would replace the death penalty with life in prison without parole, Proposition 66 -- the Death Penalty Reform and Savings Act -- purports to execute Californians more efficiently. The latter initiative would double down on the death penalty and spread the costs and burdens to local courts and counties.

    Under the guise of efficiency, Proposition 66 would add two additional layers of habeas corpus review in superior and appellate courts. It would impose unworkable time frames for appeals and habeas proceedings. And it would require attorneys who may be inexperienced, unqualified or unwilling to take death penalty cases or face expulsion from the court's public defender panel.

    Moreover, Proposition 66 would transfer 746 inmates to new death row facilities at local prisons built and maintained with county funds. Counties would be on the hook to provide separate housing, guards with specialized training, security level IV facilities, and unique physical and mental health accommodations.

    The increased workload on superior and appellate courts would take up a significant and (in some counties) overwhelming percentage of local resources. Proposition 66 prioritizes death penalty cases at the expense of all other matters before the criminal and civil courts. The judicial system's ability to handle issues like business claims, family custody hearings and traffic tickets in a timely manner would be negatively impacted.

    With a backlog of more than 150 capital appeals and habeas petitions now awaiting review, and hundreds more in the pipeline, the California Supreme Court would have to turn its full attention to death penalty cases for years, to the exclusion of other important matters, in order to meet Proposition 66's proposed timeline.

    Proposition 66 adds sped-up appeals timelines that are unenforceable and infringe on judicial and legislative separation of powers. Constitutionally required court procedures cannot be changed through the ballot process. California's death penalty system is beyond repair.

    Who Supports Proposition 62?

    A diverse coalition of people and groups support Proposition 62, including former death penalty advocates, victims' families, exonerated and wrongly convicted prisoners, retired district attorneys and judges, criminal law and economic experts, and faith, labor and civil rights leaders.

    Ron Briggs, who led the 1978 campaign that brought the death penalty to California, calls it a "costly mistake." Briggs says, "Now I know we just hurt the victims' families we were trying to help and wasted taxpayers dollars." He maintains, "The death penalty cannot be fixed. We need to replace it, lock up murderers for good, make them work, and move on."

    Franky Carrillo, who was convicted of a crime he didn't commit, was released after spending 20 years in prison. Witnesses recanted, and new evidence came to light. "I am living proof that our justice system sometimes gets it wrong," Carrillo says. "If I had been sentenced to death instead of life in prison, this might have been a different story." An innocent man might have been put to death.

    The Catholic Bishops of America supports Proposition 62, stating "capital punishment has repeatedly been shown to be severely and irrevocably flawed in its application."

    Endorsers of Proposition 62 include the California Democratic Party, California Labor Federation, Service Employees International Union, California Federation of Teachers, Exonerated Nation, National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers, Rainbow Push Coalition, California NAACP, Clergy and Laity United for Economic Justice, California Catholic Conference, and the League of Women Voters of California.

    Proposition 62 would replace California's failed death penalty system with life in prison, guaranteeing that the worst criminals would never be released. It would provide a measure of respect to victims' families by requiring convicted murderers to work and pay restitution. And it would save taxpayers $150 million per year, money that could be spent on education and repairing California's crumbling infrastructure.

    The United Nations Special Rapporteurs on summary executions, Christof Heyns (whose term recently expired), and on torture, Juan E. Mendez, have called on the U.S. government to initiate a federal moratorium on the imposition of the death penalty with a view to abolish it. They observed that more than three-quarters of countries around the world have abolished the death penalty either in law or practice. "Despite all efforts to implement capital punishment in a 'humane' fashion, time and again executions have resulted in a degrading spectacle," they wrote. "The death penalty as a form of punishment is inherently flawed."

    None of the three major international criminal tribunals -- the International Criminal Court, the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, and the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda -- allow the death penalty as a sentencing option for the most heinous of crimes over which they have jurisdiction.

    Former U.S. Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens (quoting former Justice Byron White's 1972 concurrence in Furman v. Georgia) thinks "the imposition of the death penalty represents 'the pointless and needless extinction of life with only marginal contributions to any discernible social or public purposes. A penalty with such negligible returns to the State [is] patently excessive and cruel and unusual punishment violative of the Eighth Amendment.'"

    In a 1976 Boston Globe article, then-U.S. Supreme Court Justice Arthur L. Goldberg wrote: "The deliberate institutionalized taking of human life by the state is the greatest conceivable degradation to the dignity of the human personality."

    When speaking to the French Chamber of Deputies in 1830, years after witnessing the excesses of the French Revolution, the Marquis de Lafayette, said, "I shall ask for the abolition of the punishment of death until I have the infallibility of human judgment demonstrated to me."

    The premeditated killing of human beings by the state is expensive and just plain wrong. Californians should abolish it.

    http://www.opednews.com/articles/1/C...60827-677.html

  5. #15
    Administrator Aaron's Avatar
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    Where death row inmates stand: End the death penalty or speed up executions?

    California voters face two capital punishment choices on the November ballot: End the death penalty or speed the way for execution.

    On death row, inmates are conflicted on the prospects of one-shot appeals, mandated lawyer assignments and simplified execution rules meant to rekindle a capital punishment system that hasn’t executed anyone in a decade, or the simple alternative, throw out the death penalty in favor of life without parole.

    Scott Pinholster has more reason than most to care. He's one of only a dozen inmates, out of 747 California condemned, who have exhausted their legal appeals. In his words, he is “ready to go.”

    But Pinholster expressed ambivalence — about the vote and about his own fate.

    It’s been 34 years since he stabbed to death two men who barged in on the robbery of a drug house. The hope he once placed on legal appeals setting him free faded decades ago. And he doubts voters who refused to end the death penalty in 2012 have changed their minds.

    “If they start up executions, I'll be in line, but it doesn’t matter,” the 57-year-old said in a drawl barely audible through the glass door of a solitary confinement cell. His neck and chest are as burly as when he was first locked up, but the thick black handlebar mustache is now salt-and-pepper. His bunk, cleared of bedding to double as a desk, was stacked with ink drawings done in painstaking detail.

    “After 30 years, you don’t care one way or the other,” he said.

    But pre-vote opinions among the condemned are varied at San Quentin, the historic San Francisco Bay prison that by state law houses both a new, never-used execution chamber and the state’s condemned men. In interviews by phone and during two rare tours, condemned inmates embraced the repeal of the death penalty even as others favored faster appeals, despite accelerating their own march to execution. And others voiced anxiety and predictions of violence if they were cast out into the general prison population.

    “They’re a minority,” said Paul Tuilaepa, pacing beneath the bright sun in a kennel-sized exercise yard. Tuilaepa, condemned because he killed a man in 1986 who knocked down his partner during a bar robbery, said he was certain most welcome an end to the threat of death, “they just don’t say it.”

    If the death penalty is divisive, it is more so on death row.

    “Death row is complicated,” said state prison spokeswoman Terry Thornton, who has been fielding questions since 1999 about the Western world’s largest assemblage of men sentenced to die for their crimes.

    Two measures on the November ballot propose to fix what proponents contend is a broken capital punishment system. Proposition 62 would convert death sentences to life without parole. Proposition 66 would set time limits on appeals, limit challenges to execution methods and allow the state to house condemned men outside San Quentin. If both measures pass, the one with more votes would become law.

    The last time California voters went to the polls on capital punishment (Proposition 34 in 2012 would also have replaced the death penalty with life without parole), death row tensions ran so high the entire population was placed on suicide watch. Thornton said 24-hour vigils are again planned during voting this November to “address the mental health needs” of the condemned.

    At San Quentin, the danger is real. In 2010, a despondent condemned man hung himself five days after a judge converted his death sentence to life.

    Three-fourths of the condemned men at San Quentin live in East Block, a cavernous 1930s granite block building in which steel-fronted cells are stacked five high in two long rows. The inmates eat, sleep or otherwise occupy themselves in these single steel-front cells, allowed to leave a few times a week in small groups to exercise, or alone to shower or go to the law library.

    Their days are largely undisturbed.

    There are few newcomers and fewer departures. There have been only 13 executions since 1978, none since 2006.

    Outside, the state’s 34 prisons remain crowded, with men double-bunked in cells built for one. Maximum-security yards are tense, rocked by the arrival of gang leaders released from solitary confinement, the result of a 2015 federal court settlement to disband the state’s gang management practice of indefinite isolation.

    Many condemned inmates are leery of joining that world.

    “There's a lot of anxiety building up. Some of them are scared,” said Clifton Perry, 47, condemned since 1995 for shooting a clerk during a robbery. “Me, I don't know if I can handle a bunkie after 20 years of living by myself.”

    Perry’s worries include being moved from San Quentin, where he has struck up friendships with a college professor and a poet who visit and mentor him in theology and prose. How, he wonders, does that happen if you are a lifer locked away in the north woods at Crescent City’s Pelican Bay?

    And he worries that men, “after being here chained up like monkeys and animals in a cage,” will have trouble adjusting to yards where violence is frequent.

    “I’ll have to hurt someone,” was the immediate reaction of James Thompson, 64, grizzled and sitting in a tennis-court-size exercise yard. A guard stood overhead with a loaded rifle while a line of aging, heavily tattooed men in white boxer shorts paced in military precision.

    On a new yard he will have to “re-establish” himself. After 20 years, Thompson is “comfortable” on East Block.

    He is experienced in the differences between death row and ordinary prison. Before he robbed and killed a man in California, Thompson served a long stretch locked up in Texas, also for murder. What rubs him about California is the 20 years his appeal has been in limbo. He agrees with other condemned inmates who favor the ballot proposal to keep the death penalty but speed appeals.

    “If you are going to execute me, execute me,” Thompson said. “But if you are going to let me go, let me go.”

    Death row experts said states that have repealed the death penalty have successfully absorbed the condemned into their general populations, though in Connecticut, two killers had to be sent to Pennsylvania to ensure their safety.

    California would relocate condemned inmates through the same assessment program it uses for new arrivals, Thornton said, assigning them to yards and cells based on their security threat.

    There are other reasons condemned inmates may not root for an end to the death penalty, said Terry Kupers, a Berkeley-based forensic psychiatrist and expert on prison mental health.

    Condemned inmates are guaranteed relatively extensive legal representation that can foster hope. They receive better-than-par psychiatric care. And they attract the attention of a large international anti-death penalty community.

    In the general population, “they'll spend the rest of the lives behind bars,” Kupers said. “Prisoners are forgotten.”

    http://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/l...nap-story.html
    Don't ask questions, just consume product and then get excited for next products.

    "They will hurt you. They will hurt your grandma, these people. The root cause of this is there's no discipline in the homes, they don't go to school, you know, they live off the government, no personal accountability, and they just beat people up for no reason, and it's disgusting." - Former Hamilton County Prosecutor Joe Deters

  6. #16
    Hmmm: Blue California wants to keep its death penalty, 52/36

    BY ED MORRISSEY
    hotair.com

    California voters, among the most reliably liberal in the nation, have an opportunity to pass a repeal of the death penalty in November. Proposition 62 would commute the sentence of those on California’s Death Row to life without parole and require a higher percentage of inmate income to go to victim restitution. With opposition to the death penalty a big progressive goal, and with California’s execution process among the slowest and most frustrating in the nation, one would expect overwhelming support for Proposition 62.

    Not so, according to a new poll from Survey USA. In fact, opposition to repeal leads by sixteen points, 36/52, and leads among almost all demographics. Majorities of both men (38/54) and women (33/50) oppose repeal. Voters under the age of 35 oppose it in plurality (40/45), but all other age groups oppose it by majorities and double-digit gaps. Black voters and Democrats support repeal, but not significantly enough to overcome overwhelming opposition among all other ethnic and partisan groups. Perhaps most tellingly, the only ideological demo to support repeal are those who identify as “very liberal” — and even then unimpressively at 52/32. Even the ultra-liberal Bay Area has a slight plurality opposed to repeal, 42/47.

    Some of the demos listed by SUSA are downright amusing. Smokers and non-smokers oppose repeal by almost identical figures, as do evangelicals and non-evangelicals. If you have a tattoo, you’re more likely to want to keep the death penalty (58%) than not (49%), although the non-tattooed still oppose repeal by a plurality.

    The problem with the death penalty in California (besides the issues that form my general opposition to it) is that it’s almost purely academic. California hasn’t executed anyone since 2006, and Clarence Ray Allen had been on Death Row for more than 23 years at that point. That was the second-longest string for those who eventually got executed; Stanley “Tookie” Williams spent almost 25 years waiting for his execution, which finally came in December 2005. They are two of only 13 inmates executed since the reinstatement of the death penalty in 1978.

    How many are actually on Death Row now? The state’s September 2016 lists 747 inmates, with sentencing dates from 1982 to this past May. Eight times more inmates have died of other causes (104) than of executions (13).

    Death penalty proponents will also have a referendum on the November ballot. Proposition 66 would offer several reforms to speed up the execution process, including expediting all appeals to the state Supreme Court and having attorneys assigned to death-penalty appeals immediately. Presumably this will find more support than Proposition 62, although SUSA didn’t poll on it. Will Californians take steps to fix its capital-punishment system — or be satisfied with a Death Row that just waits inmates to death?

    http://hotair.com/archives/2016/09/1...-penalty-5236/

  7. #17
    Senior Member CnCP Legend CharlesMartel's Avatar
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    California correctional officers launch pro-death penalty campaign

    With polls showing California voters poised to abolish the death penalty in just two weeks, the state correctional officers’ union is underwriting a major drive to save capital punishment.

    The California Correctional Peace Officers Association on Monday released a pair of ads encouraging voters to reject Proposition 62, which would replace the death penalty with life imprisonment without parole, and support a competing measure, Proposition 66, that aims to expedite the process and resume long-stalled executions.

    “Without the death penalty, what’s to stop a killer serving life without parole from killing inside prison?” Chuck Alexander, the union’s president, says in one ad titled “The Worst Among Us.” “It’s our last defense.”

    In an email, a spokesman for the No on Prop 62, Yes on Prop 66 campaign said an ad buy “well into the seven figures” will keep the message on broadcast and cable in the vote-rich Los Angeles media market and on Facebook and other websites statewide through the Nov. 8 election. The prison guards’ union, a former political powerhouse that has been largely quiet in recent election cycles, now holds nearly $7.5 million in its political committee.

    The spending could be pivotal for the campaign to maintain the death penalty in a state where public approval has fallen to historic lows. Four years after Californians narrowly rejected another attempt to abolish capital punishment, polling has consistently shown Proposition 62 close to the majority support it would need to pass.

    The most recent Field Poll had Proposition 62 ahead 48 percent to 37 percent among likely voters, with another 15 percent undecided. Proposition 66, meanwhile, trailed decidedly, with only 35 percent of respondents inclined to vote for it.

    More comfortable leads have been vanquished by last-minute television bombardments.

    In 2004, an initiative to limit California’s “three strikes” criminal sentencing law was projected for a 40-point margin of victory in October polls. Then, only 12 days before the election, Orange County businessman Henry T. Nicholas III agreed to bankroll a nearly $2 million TV ad campaign against the measure, starring then-Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger. The initiative ultimately failed with only 47 percent of the vote, a stunning collapse that experts at the time called “unprecedented.”

    But Field Poll director Mark DiCamillo cautioned that a relatively modest ad buy of $1 million or $2 million is unlikely to have a similar effect in this year’s “crowded, cluttered environment.”

    “This is a ballot that has hundreds of millions of dollars being spent on it, so it’s going to be hard to get their message through,” he said. “There’s so much advertising going on, and there’s so many ballot measures for voters to consider.”

    The proponents of Proposition 62 have recently hit the airwaves with their own ads emphasizing the cost savings of abolishing capital punishment.

    Jim Gonzalez, a consultant for the campaign, said having an opponent with the resources to get on broadcast television is of “great concern” for any initiative. But, he added, their measure is tracking better than the death penalty repeal was at the same point in 2012 and they “feel momentum.”

    “We are going to match their advertising in the same markets,” he said, “and we expect to receive some contributions that will allow us to expand our buy into other markets, including maybe Sacramento.”

    http://www.sacbee.com/news/politics-...#storylink=cpy

  8. #18
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    This is either misleading or confusing. This implies (and states) that prop 62 is ahead in the polls. But that doesn't fit with what i've read. For example, there's a chart of polls toward the end of this page that all show 62 failing by far.

    https://ballotpedia.org/California_P...Penalty_(2016)

  9. #19
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    Campaign irregularity: Anti-death penalty forces speak at high school, apparently without permission

    By James Rojas
    KABC News

    Foul play is called after high school students in East L.A. were lectured as to why their parents should vote to abolish the state's death penalty.

    Exonerated death row inmate Juan Melendez was invited to Garfield High School last Friday by the Yes on 62 campaign.

    "To encourage their parents to vote for Proposition 62 yes and no on Proposition 66."

    LA Unified School District policy prohibits campaigning or advocating for or against propositions in schools. Kent Scheidegger is with the Criminal Justice Legal Foundation and endorses No on 62.

    "Getting a one-sided presentation to the parents, through the students, is a misleading thing to do."

    The Yes on 62 campaign has not responded for comment.

    http://www.kabc.com/2016/10/27/exclu...n-62-campaign/
    "I realize this may sound harsh, but as a father and former lawman, I really don't care if it's by lethal injection, by the electric chair, firing squad, hanging, the guillotine or being fed to the lions."
    - Oklahoma Rep. Mike Christian

    "There are some people who just do not deserve to live,"
    - Rev. Richard Hawke

    “There are lots of extremely smug and self-satisfied people in what would be deemed lower down in society, who also deserve to be pulled up. In a proper free society, you should be allowed to make jokes about absolutely anything.”
    - Rowan Atkinson

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