In an April 27 edi­to­r­i­al, the Los Angeles Times said the death penal­ty should come to an end and the recent exon­er­a­tion of California death-row pris­on­er Vicente Benavides Figueroa illus­trates why. Benavides — an intel­lec­tu­al­ly dis­abled Mexican nation­al who was work­ing as a sea­son­al farm work­er — spent more than 25 years on death row after being wrong­ful­ly con­vict­ed and sen­tenced to death on charges of rap­ing, sodom­iz­ing, and mur­der­ing his girl­friend’s 21-month-old daugh­ter. His con­vic­tion rest­ed on exten­sive false foren­sic tes­ti­mo­ny pro­vid­ed by pros­e­cu­tion med­ical wit­ness­es who had been giv­en incom­plete hos­pi­tal records and who erro­neous­ly tes­ti­fied that the child had been sex­u­al­ly assault­ed. One California Supreme Court jus­tice described that tes­ti­mo­ny as ​“among the most hair-rais­ing false evi­dence that I’ve encoun­tered in all the time that I’ve been look­ing at crim­i­nal cas­es.” The Times called Benavides’s con­vic­tion ​“an egre­gious mis­car­riage of jus­tice” and said “[h]is exon­er­a­tion serves as a reminder of what ought to be abun­dant­ly clear by now: that despite jury tri­als, appel­late recon­sid­er­a­tion and years of motions and counter-motions, the jus­tice sys­tem is not infal­li­ble, and it is pos­si­ble (or per­haps inevitable) that inno­cent peo­ple will end up fac­ing exe­cu­tion at the hands of the state.” Benavides’s case was pros­e­cut­ed in Kern County dur­ing the admin­is­tra­tion of long-time District Attorney Ed Jagels. Elected mul­ti­ple times to head the California District Attorneys Association, Jagels suc­cess­ful­ly pushed to remove three jus­tices from the California Supreme Court whom he claimed were anti-death-penal­ty. His offi­cial Web page as dis­trict attor­ney tout­ed that Kern had the high­est per-capi­ta impris­on­ment rate of any coun­ty in state, and as of January 1, 2013, the coun­ty had more peo­ple on its death row than were sen­tenced to death in more than 99% of U.S. coun­ties. The coun­ty also has the high­est per capi­ta exon­er­a­tion rate in the state. Benavides is report­ed­ly the 26th inno­cent per­son wrong­ly con­vict­ed by Kern County pros­e­cu­tors, most of whom were wrong­ly con­vict­ed as a result of offi­cial mis­con­duct. As of March 2015, 22 of the 24 Kern County exon­er­a­tions list­ed in the National Registry of Exonerations had involved offi­cial mis­con­duct by police, pros­e­cu­tors, or oth­er gov­ern­ment offi­cials. Benavides’s exon­er­a­tion, the Times said, is also a reminder ​“of the dan­gers inher­ent in California’s efforts to speed up the cal­en­dar for death penal­ty appeals under Proposition 66 .… Moving more quick­ly to exe­cute con­vict­ed death row inmates increas­es the like­li­hood that due process will be giv­en short shrift and the inno­cent will be put to death.” The records that showed 21-month-old Consuelo Verdugo had not been sex­u­al­ly assault­ed — and that cast doubt on whether she had been mur­dered at all — were not dis­cov­ered until 7 years after tri­al. The one year that Proposition 66 gives appel­late lawyers to inves­ti­gate cas­es and file appeals makes it less like­ly that they will dis­cov­er such evi­dence ​“and thus more like­ly that inno­cent peo­ple will be put to death.” Washington Post colum­nist Radley Balko put it more stark­ly: ​“if Prop 66 had been in place when Mr. Benavides was con­vict­ed, he’d almost cer­tain­ly be dead. He’d nev­er have lived to see his exon­er­a­tion.” Balko notes that “[t]his prob­lem isn’t just lim­it­ed to California. Even as we learn more about the extent of wrong­ful con­vic­tions, pros­e­cu­tor mis­con­duct and mis­use of foren­sic evi­dence, states such as Texas, Alabama and Florida have also moved toward lim­it­ing appeals and speed­ing up exe­cu­tions.” He says “[i]t’s almost as if some law­mak­ers and law enforce­ment offi­cials think that the prob­lem with wrong­ful con­vic­tions isn’t that there are too many of them, but that they’re bad PR for the law-and-order cause. And that the best way to make them go away isn’t to fix the prob­lems that allowed them to hap­pen, but to exe­cute peo­ple before we ever get the chance to learn that they’re inno­cent.” But the prob­lems, the Times edi­tors said, may be beyond repair. ​“The unfix­able prob­lem with the death penal­ty is that mis­takes get made, wit­ness­es lie, con­fes­sions get coerced — all fac­tors that can lead to false con­vic­tions. It is abject­ly immoral to speed things up by lim­it­ing due process. The bet­ter solu­tion,” the edi­tors con­clude, ​“is to get rid of the death penalty altogether.”

(Editorial, The lat­est California death row exon­er­a­tion shows why we need to end the death penal­ty, Los Angeles Times, April 27, 2018; Radley Balko, The Watch: As California moves to speed up exe­cu­tions, a man is exon­er­at­ed after 25 years on death row, The Washington Post, April 30, 2018; CA: Prosecutor’s Fabrication is Tip of the Iceberg When It Comes to Government Misconduct in Kern County, The Open File, March 9, 2015.) See Editorials and Innocence.

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