By Sam Stanton
Sacramento Bee
SACRAMENTO, Calif. — To some, the death penalty is an important tool for prosecutors and victims. To others, it is a costly waste.
These opposing viewpoints will play out in the coming weeks over Proposition 34, which asks California voters to end the death penalty in the state and allow death row inmates to be resentenced to life in prison without any chance of parole.
Supporters of the measure, ranging from the American Civil Liberties Union to attorneys and a former San Quentin warden, are waging a campaign based on the notion that the entire process is far too costly, and that scrapping the death penalty could save cash-strapped California hundreds of millions of dollars.
They note that legal hurdles have severely limited the state’s ability to carry out executions, and that since the death penalty was reinstated in 1978 only 13 men have been executed in California -- the last in 2006.
Another 729 inmates are on death row, awaiting executions that may be years or decades away.
“The cost of the system today is so enormous,” said Don Heller, the Sacramento attorney who wrote the 1978 initiative to restore the death penalty and who now wants to do away with capital punishment. “It’s cost $4 billion to execute 13 people since 1978, approximately $330 million per execution.”
The measure includes a provision that would take $100 million out of the state’s general fund over four years and direct it to local law enforcement, money that supporters say would be more than offset by savings from ending death penalty trials, appeals and other costs.
Death penalty supporters say those arguments are hypocritical and just plain wrong.
“Basically, it doesn’t cost as much as they claim and it doesn’t need to cost as much as it does,” said Kent Scheidegger, legal director of the Criminal Justice Legal Foundation in Sacramento. “The system is entirely fixable.”
Scheidegger and others say the ACLU and other death penalty opponents have created the delays and huge costs.
Legal challenges to California’s method of execution, currently a three-drug process, have stalled executions since 2006. No end is in sight, partly because of a shortage of one of the three drugs.
Scheidegger notes there now are 13 inmates on death row whose appeals have been exhausted and who could be put to death in short order if the state switched to a one-drug process, as some other states have.
Both Ohio and Arizona conducted executions shortly after switching to a one-drug protocol. California officials have indicated in court filings that if the state moved to use a single drug it “would prefer that the execution team have three days’ notice.”
Sacramento County District Attorney Jan Scully and others say that California officials could easily exempt the death penalty from lengthy regulatory procedures and implement the one-drug protocol, and that the California District Attorneys Association has asked Gov. Jerry Brown to do so.
But Scully said she believes Brown and Attorney General Kamala Harris, both of whom oppose the death penalty but say they would enforce the law, have no interest in speeding up the process.
For now, supporters of keeping the death penalty note that they are being outspent by large margins.
Backers of Proposition 34 have raised roughly $2 million so far this year from a variety of Silicon Valley and Hollywood executives, ACLU chapters and others.
Opponents of the measure have reported raising barely $50,000, although they say they expect more contributions from law enforcement groups and elected officials and that they hope voters’ long-standing support for the death penalty will continue.
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