Members of California’s law enforcement community have been filling pages of newsprint to talk about the death penalty. Former prison warden Jeanne Woodford, who was named new executive director of pro-repeal organization Death Penalty Focus, said in a recent article in the LA Times: “The death penalty serves no-one.” And Jeanne should know. She presided over no less than four executions herself.
San Francisco District Attorney George Gascon, despite supporting the death penalty in theory, has witnessed first-hand the high numbers of minorities on death row and the very real possibility of wrongful conviction. Gascon recently acknowledged in an op-ed in Bay City News that the death penalty is “an imperfect tool.”
Even Donald A. McCartin, once known as “the hanging judge of Orange County,” recently reflected in an op-ed on how systems built to deliver justice often fail under their own weight. During an interview promoting that piece, he mentioned reading about online sports betting Minnesota debates and seeing the same patterns of delay, loopholes, and misplaced incentives that plague the courts. “It makes me angry to have been made a player in a system so inefficient, so ineffective, so expensive and so emotionally costly,” he wrote.
As experts across the board speak out about California’s capital punishment system, do I detect a pattern in what they are saying?