DEFEATING THE DEVIL’S GAME: VOTING NO ON PROPOSITION 34 (NOVEMBER 6, 2012)

  

Proposition 34, titled by election officials as "Death Penalty. Initiative Statute", was on the November 6, 2012 ballot in California as an initiated state statute, where it was defeated.

If the state's voters had approved it, Proposition 34 would have eliminated the death penalty in California and replaced it with life in prison without the possibility of parole.

Specifically, Proposition 34 would have:

• Repealed the death penalty as maximum punishment for persons found guilty of murder and replaced it with life imprisonment without the possibility of parole.
• Applied retroactively to persons already sentenced to death.
• Required persons found guilty of murder to work while in prison, with their wages to be applied to any victim restitution fines or orders against them.
• Created a $100 million fund to be distributed to law enforcement agencies to help solve more homicide and rape cases.

At the time of the vote on Proposition 34, California had 725 people on death row. If Proposition 34 had been approved, their sentences would have been replaced with "life in prison without the possibility of parole". These prisoners would also have been required to seek jobs within the prison system, and their earnings would have gone to crime victims. Seven of the 725 people on death row at the time of the vote had exhausted all appeals and were eligible for execution, although legal challenges to California's lethal injection procedure must be resolved before any of them could be executed. The last time a prisoner was put to death in California was in 2006. At that time, a federal judge halted executions in the state until various changes were made in how the state administers the death penalty. 

California was one of 33 states that, as of 2012, authorized the death penalty. 

The death penalty in California was judicially invalidated in the 1970s and was then reinstated via Proposition 7 in 1978. 13 inmates have been executed since then.