California Roundup - LA Times - D.A. candidates discuss the death penalty | OpEds: DP is Not Justice | Justice for crime victims demands dp
Steve Hall
This e-mail contains OpEds from:
San Diego Union-Tribune - Flores: DP is Not Justice
Sacramento Bee – Scully/Loya: Justice for crime victims demands dp
News Article w/ video link from:
LA Times - D.A. candidates discuss the death penalty
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http://www.utsandiego.com/news/2012/apr/26/tp-death-penalty-is-not-justice/
April 26, 2012
DEATH PENALTY IS NOT JUSTICE
By Cirilo Flores
This year, in the Easter season, San Diego reels from two recent murders – a young Iraqi mother of five and a 14-year-old boy visiting friends with his brother. Our community comes together in grief and to comfort the families who have lost loved ones. We recognize their profound pain.
During this difficult period, Easter’s promise of rebirth can seem like an illusion. The cycle of violence seems endless, with justice an impossible ideal. Some have even called for the death penalty for those responsible for these crimes.
So it is fitting that San Diegans should pause and think deeply about executions as many of us are celebrating new life. After all, Easter reminds us that before the Resurrection, an innocent man, Jesus of Nazareth, was executed by his government more than 2,000 years ago.
We know that innocent people have been convicted of murder in California – three were released in 2011 after serving a total of 57 years – and that innocent people have been executed in other states. Nationwide, 140 inmates from death rows have been exonerated of the crimes for which they were wrongly convicted. In light of possible innocence, using the death penalty puts all Californians at risk of perpetrating the ultimate injustice of executing an innocent person, for when the governor gives the final order to execute, he does so in the name of California residents, and the death certificate will read, “Homicide,” as the cause of death.
The Catholic Church holds that all human life is sacred, even the life of someone who has done grave harm. In its 1998 “Good Friday Appeal to End the Death Penalty,” the U.S. Catholic Bishops stated, “Our witness to respect for life shines most brightly when we demand respect for each and every human life, including the lives of those who fail to show that respect for others. The antidote to violence is love, not more violence.”
Since the death penalty was reinstated in 1978, the state of California has devoted more than $4 billion to carry out a mere 13 executions. For the same $300 million we spent per extremely rare execution, we could have funded a full K-12 education for 3,000 children. We could have provided after-school programs for over 200,000 students.
Or we could have hired nearly 6,000 police officers to prevent and solve violent crimes. An outrageous 46 percent of homicide cases are never closed and 56 percent of reported rapes go unsolved every year in California because of a shortage of resources. While we spend hundreds of millions every year on our broken death-penalty system, we fail to fully protect our neighborhoods from violent criminals. We already have a much less expensive way to protect our society and to secure accountability from the guilty – a sentence of life in prison without possibility of parole. Our conscience and budgets can no longer justify any other option.
Growing up in a barrio neighborhood in Riverside County, I saw firsthand how violence destroyed lives and families. I knew perpetrators and victims of violent crime, yet I came to the conclusion that the death penalty serves no one – not society, not victim’s families, not those seeking personal safety. We cannot teach that killing is wrong by killing. We cannot bring healing to families without forgiveness. We cannot sufficiently fund desperately needed law enforcement and social services when we waste hundreds of millions per year on the death penalty.
Easter moves Christians to reflect on the life of Jesus. In his name we uphold the value of justice and renew our commitment to the dignity of all human life. This November, for the first time in 31 years, we will have the option to say no to capital punishment. That is why, along with my fellow bishops of the California Catholic Conference, I support the SAFE California Act to replace the death penalty with a sentence of life in prison without possibility of parole.
Justice requires an effective means if it is to bring about the protection of society. As a citizen and a Catholic, I pray that this coming November all Californians will find the use of the death penalty unnecessary, wasteful, and unjust.
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Flores is coadjutor bishop of the Roman Catholic Diocese of San Diego.
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http://www.sacbee.com/2012/04/26/4443165/justice-for-crime-victims-demands.html
Thursday, Apr. 26, 2012 | Page 11A
Another View: Justice for crime victims demands death penalty
Jan Scully & Phyllis Loya
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Jan Scully, Sacramento County district attorney, and Phyllis Loya, the mother of a murdered Pittsburg police officer, are responding to Tuesday's Viewpoints article "Death penalty in California does not make us any safer." The article stated that the ballot initiative SAFE California "will provide public protection by keeping those truly guilty of death penalty crimes locked up for life."
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The American Civil Liberties Union has waged a relentless attack on public safety in California for decades. Their goal: overturn the death penalty. Their approach has been shameful and costly, in dollars and pain for victims.
We are writing as the Sacramento County district attorney and the mother of a Pittsburg police officer whose son Larry Lasater was killed by a vicious murderer. We want California to know who's behind the effort to abolish California's death penalty.
It's the ACLU. They are responsible for endless delays, frivolous appeals and a mountain of misinformation. Now, they claim capital punishment is broken and should be repealed.
This November, Californians will vote and hopefully reject the ACLU. The reason is that Californians don't want the most violent criminals to escape justice: 135 sexual assault murderers, 126 torture murderers, 135 child murderers and 41 cop-killers.
Lawrence Bittaker raped, tortured and killed five teenage girls. Richard "the Nightstalker" Ramirez murdered 13 innocent citizens in Los Angeles, sexually assaulting, torturing and mutilating many of his victims. Richard Allen Davis kidnapped, raped and strangled 12-year-old Polly Klaas. Serial killer Robert Rhoades kidnapped, raped, tortured and murdered 8-year-old Michael Lyons as he walked home from school. These are the criminals who earned a death sentence due to the most violent of crimes, with adjudicated special circumstances. They are the ones the ACLU wants you to save.
Sadly, death penalty opponents mask their intentions in a purported concern for the state budget. Don't be fooled.
The ACLU is responsible for the cost of capital punishment, and they're wrong on their promises of savings. Even with life without parole, taxpayers must still pay for appeals, a lifetime of confinement and skyrocketing health care costs to make sure criminals stay healthy in prison. A Rand Corp. study found there is no objective data to give a true estimate of the costs of the death penalty.
The suggestion that commuting death sentences keeps criminals in jail is false. Former Gov. Edmund "Pat" Brown commuted sentences of several death row inmates, including Norman Whitehorn and Eddie Wein, both of whom were later paroled, only to kill again.
That's not justice, it's criminal.
Voters know better. They support the death penalty and will not be fooled. Public safety leaders will never forget crime victims or dishonor their memory. We will continue demanding justice.
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http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/opinion-la/la-ol-da-video-death-penalty20120425,0,3204371.story
April 25, 2012 | 5:11 PM PDT
D.A. candidates discuss the death penalty
By Robert Greene
An initiative to ban the death penalty in California qualified for the November ballot on Monday. Organizers are now urging district attorneys not to seek the death penalty at least until the Nov. 6 vote. Meanwhile, voters can see and hear the candidates for Los Angeles County district attorney discuss the issue -- and the field is split. Candidates' made their statements on a page unveiled Wednesday by The Times' editorial board.
Bobby Grace and Danette Meyers said they would be willing to see the death penalty go, given how hard it is to actually get to an execution in California. Both discuss the costs of providing appellate lawyers to condemned prisoners.
"We’re not being truthful to either defendants’ families or to victims’ families when telling them people are going to executed when clearly they’re not," Grace said.
VIDEO: The D.A. candidates on realignment and the death penalty
"That system is broken," Meyers said. "It is not working at all."
The gist of the campaign being run by SAFE California -- the people behind the November measure -- is that the costs of keeping the death penalty in California are too high. It's a politically savvy move, and it is likely to win the support of people who are morally opposed to the death penalty but also people who might favor keeping the penalty -- including people like Grace and Meyers, both of whom have sent convicts to death row -- if only executions were simpler, surer and less costly.
Candidates Alan Jackson, Jackie Lacey and Carmen Trutanich said they favor keeping the death penalty.
Jackson said the people of California have made it clear that they believe the death penalty is appropriate.
Lacey called execution "the appropriate punishment for some of the worst criminals that California has."
Trutanich said justice demands that the penalty remain. "In certain circumstances, in the most heinous cases, cases in which the evidence is overwhelming, the death penalty is called for in California," Trutanich said.
The district attorney election is June 5. If no single candidate gets more than 50% of the votes cast, there will be a runoff between the top two finishers in November -- on the same day as the death penalty vote. That raises the prospect of the initiative and the district attorney campaigns being closely linked, with candidates being called on to weigh in heavily for, or against, the measure.
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Steve Hall
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