judges

If statistics are any indication, the system may well be allowing some innocent defendants to be executed.

From this day forward, I no longer shall tinker with the machinery of death. I feel morally and intellectually obligated simply to concede that the death penalty experiment has failed.

[T]here’s no chance California’s death penalty can ever be fixed. The millions wasted on this broken system would be much better spent keeping teachers, police and firefighters on their jobs.

As a Superior Court judge, I tried many murder cases, including one death-penalty prosecution, which is still in limbo after almost two decades of appeals. In my 20 years on the bench, I came to recognize the death penalty as inherently unfair, arbitrary, costly and ineffective.

“Whether or not one receives the death penalty depends upon the discretion of the prosecutor who initiates the proceeding, the competence of counsel who represents the defendant, the race of the victim, the race of the defendant, the make-up of the jury, the attitude of the judge, and the attitude and make-up of the appellate courts that review the verdict.”

The death penalty is imposed not only in a freakish and discriminatory manner, but also in some cases upon defendants who are actually innocent.

Lest there be any doubt, the idea that the death penalty is fairly and rationally imposed in this country is a farce.

I have yet to see a death case among the dozens coming to the Supreme Court on eve-of-execution stay applications in which the defendant was well represented at trial... [P]eople who are well represented at trial do not get the death penalty.

The best available evidence indicates that, on the one hand, innocent people are sentenced to death with materially greater frequency than was previously supposed and that, on the other hand, convincing proof of their innocence often does not emerge until long after their convictions.

If statistics are any indication, the system may well be allowing some innocent defendants to be executed.