On June 30th, the California Commission on the Fair Administration of Justice released a 107-page report on the state’s capital punishment system, calling it “dysfunctional” and a “broken system.” The Commission, chaired by former Attorney General John Van de Kamp, came to the conclusion that California would save hundreds of millions of dollars if capital punishment was eliminated. The report states, “The families of murder victims are cruelly deluded into believing that justice will be delivered with finality during their lifetimes.” It adds, “The strain placed by these cases on our justice system, in terms of the time and attention taken away from other business that the courts must conduct for our citizens, is heavy.”
One of the options mentioned by the report was for the state to eliminate the death penalty and convert the maximum punishment to life in prison without parole. The Commission cited the hundreds of millions of dollars a year the state would save and added, “most California death sentences are actually sentences of lifetime incarceration.” If the state chooses to keep the death penalty, the Commission recommended that California reduce the number of crimes eligible for the death penalty from 21 to 5, decreasing the death row population by almost 50 percent.
(Associated Press, “Report: California death penalty system deeply flawed,” New York Times, July 1, 2008). See also the California Commission on the Fair Administration of Justice report at http://www.ccfaj.org/. See Costs and Studies.
