Corrections1 staff
The Los Angeles Times is reporting on an interesting case where a white supremacist gang hitman convicted of first-degree murder in California requested death row from an Orange County jury and received it.
Yet, it wasn’t guilt or a need for repentance that drove Billy Joe Johnson to request the death penalty, instead it was the expectation that conditions on death row are more comfortable than in other maximum-security prisons and that any date with the executioner is decades away if it comes at all.
Whereas in other states executions are carried out in a relatively short period of time, capital punishment in California has become so bogged down by legal challenges as to become a nearly empty threat, say experts on both sides of the issue.
“This is a dramatic reaffirmation of what we’ve already known for some time, that capital punishment in California takes way too long,” Kent Scheidegger, legal director for the law-and-order Criminal Justice Legal Foundation in Sacramento, said of Johnson’s bet that he’ll live a long life on death row. “This guy certainly feels like it’s worth the risk.”
Since 1977, 71 California death row inmates have died from either natural causes, suicide or assault, whereas only 13 actual executions have been carried out.
Currently, there are 685 people waiting to die in California, that’s the largest death row population in the nation. Yet a moratorium came into effect four years ago, so the state hasn’t put a single inmate to death since ’05.
In San Quentin, where Johnson will now reside, death row inmates have better access to telephones than regular inmates, and are granted “contact visits” in plexiglass rooms by themselves rather than in communal halls.
Given the state’s high levels of overpopulation, death row inmates have close to the only private accomodations in the system.
Death row prisoners are served breakfast and dinner in their cells, can usually mingle with others in the outdoor exercise yards while eating their sack lunches and have exclusive control over the television, CD player or other diversions in their cells.
“Death row inmates probably have the most liberal telephone privileges of anyone in state custody,” said Terry Thornton, spokeswoman for the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation, explaining that they need ready access to their attorneys and can often make calls from their cells over a phone that can be rolled along the cellblock.
Information from the Los Angeles Times.