EDITORIAL: San Jose Mercury News Endorses Death Penalty Repeal, Says Competing Measure Would Magnify Inequity

Weighing in on California’s competing death penalty ballot initiatives, the San Jose Mercury News editorial board urged voters to support repeal of capital punishment and reject a proposal to speed up executions. The editorial called California’s death penalty system, “a failure on every level,” noting that the state has spent $4 billion to carry out just 13 executions and the $150 million annual savings the independent Legislative Analysts Office says death penalty abolition would achieve could be better spent “on education, on rehabilitating young offenders or on catching more murderers, rapists and other violent criminals.” The editorial also addresses the misperception that the death penalty deters crime: “District attorneys throughout the state argue that the death penalty is a tool to condemn society’s most vicious criminals. But this claim flies in the face of actual evidence: For every year between 2008-2013, the average homicide rate of states without the death penalty was significantly lower than those with capital punishment.” After describing the racially- and geographically-biased application of the death penalty in California, the editorial argues that Proposition 66, which proposes to speed up executions, “would actually magnify the inequity and sometimes outright injustice in the death penalty’s application” by reducing the opportunities to catch mistakes. “In the United States, for every 10 prisoners who have been executed since the death penalty was reinstated in 1976, one person on death row has been set free.” Speeding up executions, the editorial says, “is the opposite of what nations concerned with actual justice would do.”

(Editorial, “Mercury News editorial: Abolish the death penalty; Vote yes on Proposition 62,” The Mercury News, July 15, 2016.) See Editorials.