California “prosecutors continue to grow the state’s death row population each year, upholding a system rooted in slavery, lynchings and racial inequities that persist to this day,” Contra Costa County District Attorney Diana Becton writes in a recent editorial in the Sacramento Bee.
Pointing to the fact that, since Gov. Gavin Newsom declared a moratorium on the death penalty in 2019, “17 people have since been sentenced to death in California — 80% of whom are Black or Latino,” and that every person sentenced to death in California who has been exonerated was a person of color, Becton states “As the elected district attorney and a former judge in Contra Costa County, I cannot fulfill my obligation to seek justice and ensure people are treated with fairness through a death penalty system so deeply ingrained with racial disparities.”
She cites the April petition filed by a coalition of prominent civil rights and legal organizations at the CA Supreme Court that provided “Extensive empirical evidence demonstrat[ing] that California’s capital punishment scheme is administered in a racially discriminatory manner and violates the equal protection provisions of the state Constitution.” It is, she believes, “the statewide remedy to finally address the racial disparities that have always been a part of capital punishment.” Becton urges the Court to consider the evidence and “ensure that the death penalty system can no longer be used as a tool to perpetuate discrimination.”