Retired Orange County, California Superior Court Judge Donald A. McCartin, who was once known as ​“the hang­ing judge,” recent­ly called for an end to the death penal­ty. In a col­umn he pub­lished in the Orange County Register, McCartin revealed that a num­ber of recent death penal­ty cas­es and rul­ings by the U.S. Supreme Court have led him to now oppose cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment because it is expen­sive and can nev­er be applied in a fair and bal­anced way. He wrote:

This may seem strange com­ing from a man known as the ​“hang­ing judge” of Orange County, but I think it’s time to abol­ish the death penal­ty. During my 15 years on the bench (1978- 1993), I sent 9 men to death row. I believed then it was the appro­pri­ate pun­ish­ment for cer­tain mur­ders, but recent events have altered my view.

…

[L]egal debates result in stag­ger­ing expens­es and years of irres­o­lu­tion. These expens­es have helped con­vert me. In times of huge bud­get deficits, too much mon­ey is squan­dered in mur­der tri­als and retrials. 

Studies show cap­i­tal cas­es cost triple the amount of non-cap­i­tal cas­es. When I tried Randy Kraft, one of this coun­try’s most pro­lif­ic ser­i­al killers, the tab exceed­ed $10 mil­lion. This hem­or­rhage of tax­pay­ers’ mon­ey con­tin­ues as his case and hun­dreds more crawl through the legal labyrinth, but any­one sen­tenced to die is just­ly enti­tled to his Supreme Court-man­dat­ed appeals. It cur­rent­ly costs $90,000 more every year to house a con­vict on death row. Clearly, waste could be dras­ti­cal­ly curbed by sim­ply dump­ing capital punishment.

I rec­og­nize that bas­ing my deci­sion on sys­temic fail­ures opens me to the argu­ment that once the prob­lems are cor­rect­ed, cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment would be accept­able. Though this sounds log­i­cal, I believe fix­ing these defi­cien­cies is search­ing for the Holy Grail. The chances of estab­lish­ing fault­less gov­ern­ment, impec­ca­ble indus­try or immac­u­late reli­gious orga­ni­za­tions bor­der on nonexistent. 

This also applies to the quest for per­fect jus­tice. Human error, inequities, bias­es and per­son­al ide­olo­gies cre­ate the prob­lems that have caused my rejec­tion of the death penal­ty. Because these frail­ties will not mag­i­cal­ly van­ish, cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment can­not be imple­ment­ed with any sense of bal­ance or fair­ness, thus it must be abolished.

(Orange County Register, June 24, 2005) See New Voices and Costs.

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