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.

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