In his YouTube talk, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dzxMx6bSP0I, “The death penalty is dying,” Robert D. Bacon, a California defense attorney who has represented death-sentenced individuals for 34 years, maintains that “The good news is that the death penalty is dying. It is in major decline internationally, it’s true nationally, and it’s true in California. Still, “It will not die of its own. It needs to be pushed over the edge by activists.” Bacon points out that of the 27 states that have a death penalty, “only a handful approve death sentences,” and “within those states, only a handful of counties” pursue death sentences. The death penalty “no longer has the salience as a political issue that it once did. Public opinion support is declining very slowly,” but it’s a steady decline, and a recent poll shows “the younger you are, the more likely you’ll oppose the death penalty.”
In February 2023, California Attorney General Rob Bonta announced the launch of a conviction integrity unit in the Department of Justice “to conduct investigations and reviews aimed at resolving wrongful or improper criminal convictions, including matters where there may be evidence of significant integrity issues, and to identify cases that may be suitable for potential resentencing.” But, according to Lexis-Olivier Ray in his piece https://tinyurl.com/bkwnf3ee “Performative Justice: Nearly 2 Years After Launching Unit to Free Innocent People in Prison, Attorney General’s Office Hasn’t Reviewed A Single Case,” in LA TACO, “nearly two years later, not a single person has been exonerated or resentenced through the AG’s Post Conviction Justice Unit (PCJU). In fact, the unit hasn’t even started accepting applications.” Ray says the AG’s office “declined to answer a list of questions from L.A. TACO sent via email in September,” but issued a statement that included an explanation that the unit “is currently developing protocols for case intake, investigation, and evaluation,” and that the two lawyers in the PCJU “have been examining conviction review protocols throughout the country.”
Robert Roberson was sentenced to death in Texas in 2003, convicted by a jury that believed his daughter, Nikki, had died from shaken baby syndrome. That diagnosis has been so discredited that the neurosurgeon who first proposed it as a possible cause for brain injury in babies told the Washington Post https://tinyurl.com/4e7646f6 in 2015, shortly before his death, “I am doing what I can so long as I have a breath to correct a grossly unjust situation.” Nevertheless, Attorney General Ken Paxton and Gov. Greg Abbott are hell-bent on executing Roberson despite the overwhelming evidence that Roberson had never abused Nikki and was an attentive single parent. “Part of the reason Abbott and the CCA (Court of Criminal Appeals) are fighting so hard to see Roberson executed is that Texas is one of the states that imposes the death penalty the most. If moral and legal certainty in the death penalty can’t survive in Texas, it won’t survive much longer anywhere else. And for some state officials, that is a more worrying thought than the possibility of an innocent man being executed.,” C.J. Ciaramella writes in Reason. https://tinyurl.com/3tcat4tx
