On the death penalty

Apparently Governor Gavin "French Laundry" Newsom, in one of his last pronouncements as governor, has commuted all of the death penalty convictions in the state to life in prison,  and predictably, his note justifying his action is, shall we say, a wee bit scanty on the specifics.  There are reasons to oppose the death penalty--it isn't terribly good at reducing crime, it's awfully permanent if you get it wrong, and it's horribly expensive--but Newsom really doesn't address that.

What is striking, however, is that there are important protections that are being lost for the convicted.  I've got a friend who is now a public defender in Alabama, and he's working to do capital defense because you can bill as many hours as the defense needs, among other reasons.  Yes, it's pretty sad that capital defense is such a good business there, but what's notable for the California cases is that capital cases do indeed have some things to protect the defendant that don't exist for other cases--mandatory appeals and reviews, higher limits on legal hours, and the like.

So what Newsom is doing here, more or less, is to ironically reduce the protections for these inmates while infuriating the families and friends of the victims of these 500+ murderers.  It's no surprise that he did this right after the mid-term elections to avoid serious blowback against his party.

My take here is that most of the objections to capital punishment are in fact objections to lazy prosecution--crimes brought to indictment and trial without adequate investigation and release of exculpatory evidence, which forces defendants to either do their own investigation (poor defendants cannot do this reasonably, they can't afford a legal "dream team" like OJ Simpson hired) or face a Hobson's choice of accepting a conviction they may not deserve, or becoming bankrupt themselves.

The solution, or at least a very real improvement, is to audit prosecution records and see if adequate investigation and release of possibly exculpatory evidence is done.  If not, we have problems for all crimes, not just the ones for which we would execute a person.