The second trend which has been percolating beneath the surface
for more than two decades is a recognition of the full cost of
the death penalty, fiscal and human, and the devastating
opportunity costs our futile machinery of legal death inflicts on
other law enforcement measures which can effectively reduce crime
and punish its perpetrators more swiftly and consistently.
As early as March 1988, only a year and half after Chief Justice
Rose Bird was forced by voters to leave the Court, Stephen
Magagnini of the Sacramento Bee documented how California could
save $90 million each year by replacing the death penalty with
LWOP.
At that time, Magagnini estimated that at an extra cost of $90
million a year, and assuming the historical rate of about six
executions each year, taxpayers would be paying about $15 million
per execution. Two decades later, to borrow Mahatma Gandhi’s memorable
phrase, we can say this estimate was rather a “Himalayan
miscalculation” — in the low direction!
Since 1977, California has had 13 executions at a cost placed by
federal Ninth Circuit Judge Arthur Alarcon and Loyola Law School
Professor Paula Mitchell at $4 billion. That amounts to about
$300 million dollars per execution, or 20 times what seemed to
Magagnini and others a reasonable estimate in 1988. A report by
Natasha Minsker at ACLU of Northern California nicely sums up the
question of costs, “And today, with California’s urgent budget crisis in law
enforcement and victims’ services as well as other vital areas,
we simply can’t afford this kind of extravagance!”
Getting more cops and homicide investigators on the beat, solving
more “cold case” homicides and improving on the clearance rates
for murder now at only around 50% in many of our counties,
keeping services for victims adequately funded, and “connecting
the dots” to prevent some of these homicides and other violent
crimes — these are agendas the public can understand. And SB 490
gives them the opportunity to rethink priorities in a situation
the voters didn’t have before them in 1972, 1978, or 1986.
Finally, there’s a third trend that’s been quietly percolating
over these eventful decades: a recognition that LWOP actually
means what it says in California! Over 3700 California prisoners
have received this sentence, with only a handful released because
of the one “escape clause” we should want to keep: later it had
been discovered that they were actually innocent of the offenses
for which they had been convicted. LWOP, like the death penalty,
spells permanent incarceration and death in prison — but allows
room for correcting the rare but not unknown miscarriage of
justice.
Today, 34 years after the fateful passage of SB 155 which you
courageously sought to avert, we are turning the tide: SB 490
points the way to victory through the ballot box. On this day, as
victory is within our sight, we might remember the words of the
late Justice Stanley Mosk, a great California jurist and tireless
public servant under you and your father:
“The day will come when all mankind will deem killing to be
immoral, whether committed by one individual or many
individuals organized into a state.”
To these words we may add that many Californians ready to support
the death penalty in the abstract may nevertheless prefer, as
polls have shown for some 20 years, a more swift, reliable, and
cost-effective system of justice based on LWOP+R. Please join us
in reaching out to these citizens, who can become our partners in
victory through SB 490 and the democratic choice it offers.
