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State's death penalty: a hollow promise?
‘The death penalty in California doesn’t really exist,’ one victim’s father says of a system that has been declared dysfunctional by a state commission
Sunday, April 25, 2010 at 12:04 a.m
<snipped>
In the three decades since the death penalty was reinstated, 86 condemned inmates have died in California. Thirteen were executions. Death-row prisoners are far more likely to succumb to natural causes. That’s what claimed 50 of them. Suicide is more common, too.
The first state-conducted execution in California was in 1893, and for the next seven decades, there was at least one a year — and as many as 17. In the 32 years leading up to the state Supreme Court declaring the death penalty unconstitutional in 1972, there were 187 executions.
In the 32 years since the state reinstituted the death penalty: 13. And never more than two in any year. The last was Clarence Ray Allen. He was convicted of ordering the murders of three people in Fresno and received his death sentence in 1982, but wasn’t executed until January 2006. On one of his last appeals, Allen, then 76, argued that his long stay on death row amounted to “cruel and unusual punishment” in violation of the Eighth Amendment.
That wasn’t a new argument. When the state Supreme Court outlawed executions in 1972, it lamented the “cruel and unusual” nature of forcing inmates to wait so long to be executed. The average wait then? About eight years.
*Much more at link!
The execution chamber and lethal-injection table at San Quentin State Prison. 1996 file photo
Male inmates awaiting execution in California are housed at San Quentin State Prison, where Capt. K.J. Williams once ran death row.
Article:
http://www.signonsandiego.com/news/2010/apr/25/hollow-promise/
‘The death penalty in California doesn’t really exist,’ one victim’s father says of a system that has been declared dysfunctional by a state commission
Sunday, April 25, 2010 at 12:04 a.m
<snipped>
In the three decades since the death penalty was reinstated, 86 condemned inmates have died in California. Thirteen were executions. Death-row prisoners are far more likely to succumb to natural causes. That’s what claimed 50 of them. Suicide is more common, too.
The first state-conducted execution in California was in 1893, and for the next seven decades, there was at least one a year — and as many as 17. In the 32 years leading up to the state Supreme Court declaring the death penalty unconstitutional in 1972, there were 187 executions.
In the 32 years since the state reinstituted the death penalty: 13. And never more than two in any year. The last was Clarence Ray Allen. He was convicted of ordering the murders of three people in Fresno and received his death sentence in 1982, but wasn’t executed until January 2006. On one of his last appeals, Allen, then 76, argued that his long stay on death row amounted to “cruel and unusual punishment” in violation of the Eighth Amendment.
That wasn’t a new argument. When the state Supreme Court outlawed executions in 1972, it lamented the “cruel and unusual” nature of forcing inmates to wait so long to be executed. The average wait then? About eight years.
*Much more at link!
The execution chamber and lethal-injection table at San Quentin State Prison. 1996 file photo
Male inmates awaiting execution in California are housed at San Quentin State Prison, where Capt. K.J. Williams once ran death row.
Article:
http://www.signonsandiego.com/news/2010/apr/25/hollow-promise/
