Setting a deadline on California death penalty cases will never work; here’s why

John Gajdos, in his Jan. 22 letter to the editor, suggests the California legal system set the “clock” so that condemned inmates have a maximum of five years from sentencing to execution in San Quentin prison. The letter reflects the absolute failure of the criminal justice system to educate the public on how capital punishment laws actually work in this state.

The process is extraordinarily complex. All capital cases automatically go from the trial court directly to the California Supreme Court after the death judgment is rendered. Each year, the state’s highest court receives thousands of petitions for review, covering both civil and criminal matters. From these, the seven justices and their staffs cull the petitions down to a few hundred or so.

Since the court has no discretion with regard to capital cases — it has to take them — they have to be incorporated into the court’s workload. Thus, it might take more than a year for the court to hear an appeal in a specific case, and that’s if everything proceeds apace.

Following trial, transcripts have to be readied for the appeal, a process that can take months. Complicating the timeline is the fact that appellate attorneys have to be hired to represent condemned defendants. For obvious reasons, these attorneys should be well-versed in death penalty jurisprudence. Because most condemned inmates have no money to pay attorneys who ordinarily charge $500 or more per hour, public defenders — already vastly over-burdened with other cases — have to add these cases to the pile. Some inmates go years without appellate attorneys.

Then comes the actual appeal process. First the attorneys have to decide which issues they want to highlight. This process can take some time, particularly if the attorneys are juggling other capital cases. Among the potential issues: “incompetence” of counsel. There have been cases, in fact, where trial attorneys fail to even put on a defense. Or there may be police misconduct, such as gathering evidence without search warrants. Or prosecutors succeed in convincing jurors to vote death for a defendant who is mentally challenged, with an IQ below 70, for example.

And what if a condemned individual participated in a crime with another person? Was he, or she, acting on his or her own volition, or under duress? This issue is particularly relevant for women or for younger people who might commit crimes —drug-related murders, for example — out of fear of retaliation from older, violent or authoritarian individuals.

DNA evidence also presents another complicating issue; over the past few years, more than 100 condemned inmates nationally have been exonerated via new evidence. Death penalty proponents often minimize this factor, arguing the vast majority of death row inmates are guilty; so what, if a few innocents are executed along the way? It’s a small price to pay for ridding society of bad people. That is not how the law works, however. DNA testing sometimes takes a long time, since labs are backed up with samples from convicted and condemned inmates proclaiming their innocence.

When the state Supreme Court finally hears a case, that is not the last step. If the court upholds a death sentence, the case can be appealed to federal courts. California has absolutely no control over what a federal appeals court decides to do, or how long it takes to render a decision. In fact, some cases involve more appeals to federal than state courts. Before he was executed in 1992, 14 years after murdering two boys in San Diego, attorneys for Robert Alton Harris filed dozens of appeals in federal courts. Mr. Gajdos suggests defense attorneys wait until the last minute to file appeals, but no attorney, at least in modern times, has ever waited until an execution is imminent to file his or her first appeal.

There can be no schedule for executions. It may be true that California’s capital punishment machinery is hopelessly broken and that abolitionists have purposely gummed up the machinery. Death rows hold some very bad people, but so do maximum security prisons in general. And there lies the biggest issue: Juries sometimes sentence people to life in prison who have committed far worse crimes than those waiting on death row. And some prosecutors rely on jailhouse “snitches,” accomplices who walk away free after testifying against their partners in crime who earn death sentences.

There is no way to make capital punishment “workable.” Creating a “timeline” is an absurdly impossible solution. Better to end the death penalty and place all of California’s most vicious and violent felons in the general population in increasingly over-crowded prisons where they can live six or seven to a cell for the rest of their miserable lives and save taxpayers millions of dollars each year.

This story was originally published February 12, 2016 at 8:48 AM with the headline "Setting a deadline on California death penalty cases will never work; here’s why."