September 28, 2016 4:21 PM
Will end of death penalty bring campaign against
life imprisonment?
By Alexei
Koseff
If
California voters abolish the death penalty this fall, its foes will go after
life imprisonment next, proponents of a measure to speed up the capital
punishment process warned Wednesday.
“Once
all those attorneys who have been trying to prevent the death penalty from
being enforced have nothing better to do, they’re going to turn to life without
parole,” Dane Gillette, former chief assistant attorney
general of California, told The Sacramento Bee Editorial Board on Tuesday. It’s “the next step to get rid of what they consider to be
too much incarceration.”
Voters face
two contrasting death penalty initiatives this November: Proposition 62, which
would replace it with life without parole, and Proposition 66, which aims to
expedite the appeals process by expanding the pool of lawyers eligible to take
on capital cases and instituting shorter timelines for legal challenges.
Gillette
said Proposition 62 supporters overstate the promised savings on litigation and
incarceration, because inmates will simply bring the same sort of petitions
against their life sentences that they currently bring against their death sentences – a phenomenon that he said can be seen in states where there is no longer capital punishment.
Kent
Scheidegger, legal director of the Criminal Justice Legal Foundation, pointed
out that California has already reversed course on life imprisonment for
minors. After the U.S. Supreme Court in 2012 limited the use of life terms for
murderers under the age of 18, California passed a law allowing those
in its prisons to be resentenced.
“If the
death penalty is abolished on Tuesday, the drive to abolish life without parole
begins on Wednesday,” Scheidegger said.
If the death penalty is abolished on Tuesday, the drive to abolish life without parole begins on Wednesday.Kent Scheidegger, legal director of the Criminal Justice Legal Foundation
Ana Zamora,
who is managing the campaign against expediting the appeals process, said that
is “patently false,” and noted the death penalty should be banned for a variety
of ethical, legal and fiscal reasons.
Proposition
66, on the other hand, could allow executions to resume again after more than a
decade of hiatus by ending the administrative review that has held up a new lethal injection protocol
since it was unveiled by the state last year. It would also give corrections
officials flexibility on where to house death row inmates so that those deemed
less dangerous are not kept in the maximum-security San Quentin facility that
critics argue has made the death penalty too expensive to continue.
But
Sacramento County District Attorney Anne Marie Schubert said voters should
ultimately not focus on the death penalty as an issue of cost.
“Are
we not willing to pay as a society the cost of making sure, one, that the
system has the integrity we expect, and that ultimately the sentence is
recommended by a jury is carried out?” she said. “That’s the reality of the system: It costs money.”
The
proponents also rejected criticisms that capital punishment is not dispensed
equitably. A recent Sacramento Bee analysis
found the death penalty is imposed in a declining number of counties in
California, with the vast majority of new sentences coming from just five in
Southern California.
“For
the local community to have a voice and to have an influence over how criminal
justice is administered in their local area is not a defect,”
Scheidegger said. “It is local democracy...working as
designed.”
Alexei
Koseff: 916-321-5236,
@akoseff
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