Santa Clara County District Attorney Jeff Rosen announced earlier this month that he had filed a motion in Superior Court to recall the 15 death cases previously prosecuted by his office and resentence each individual to life without the possibility of parole. (One of the 15 has subsequently requested to be dropped from the resentencing motion.)
In a press release, Rosen explained that he is taking this action because he “had lost faith in capital punishment as a fair and effective crime deterrent.” It’s a system, Rosen said, that is “a fruitless and unfair effort that left victims and perpetrators in legal limbo for decades.
“The question is not whether these 15 human beings deserve the death penalty. It’s whether the two million people of Santa Clara County deserve the indignity and ineffectiveness of the death penalty. It’s an antiquated, racially biased, error-prone system that deters nothing and costs us millions of public dollars and our integrity as a community that cherishes justice.”
Rosen stopped seeking death sentences in 2020 after the killing of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer. Elected in 2011, he sought death sentences in four cases and was successful in one. Melvin Forte was convicted and sentenced to death in May 2011 for the kidnapping, sexual assault, and murder of Ines Sailer in San Jose.
In an interview with the LA Times, Rosen explained that the catalyst for his decision to seek resentencing in the 14 cases was a visit to Bryan Stevenson’s Legacy Museum in Montgomery, Alabama, which powerfully presents the history of slavery and racism in the United States. He told the Times that with its display of racial lynchings, in particular, he was forced to face the stark reality of the similarity between lynching and the death penalty. Racism is clearly a factor in California’s death sentencing. Thirty-five percent of those on death row are Black, while the state’s Black population is only 5%, according to the Public Policy Institute. (The percentage of Black people on U.S. death rows is about 41%, even though Black people account for approximately 14% of the U.S. population.)
“Judges and juries of the People should decide where an inmate dies. God should decide when,” Rosen stated in his press release.
