California Committee on Revision of Penal Code Recommends Repeal of Death Penalty

A com­mit­tee cre­at­ed by the California state leg­is­la­ture to study the state’s penal code and pro­pose improve­ments in the law has rec­om­mend­ed that California repeal its death penal­ty and expe­di­tious­ly reduce the size of its death row. 

At the con­clu­sion of a vir­tu­al meet­ing on May 14, 2021, the California Committee on Revision of the Penal Code (CRPC) unan­i­mous­ly vot­ed to rec­om­mend that the state abol­ish the death penal­ty. It was the first ever pol­i­cy vote on the death penal­ty by the Committee, which was estab­lished by an act of the state leg­is­la­ture in 2019. Committee chair Michael Romano said “[a] full report detail­ing [the com­mit­tee’s] rec­om­men­da­tions, includ­ing sup­port­ing analy­sis and data, will be released lat­er this summer.”

The CRPC’s rec­om­men­da­tion fol­lowed an expan­sive review of California death-penal­ty law and pol­i­cy by the committee’s staff. A CRPC staff mem­o­ran­dum dat­ed May 5, 2021 con­clud­ed that “[e]liminating the death penal­ty is a crit­i­cal step towards cre­at­ing a fair and equi­table jus­tice sys­tem for all in California, as the ulti­mate pun­ish­ment is plagued by legal, racial, bureau­crat­ic, finan­cial, geo­graph­ic, and moral prob­lems that have proven intractable.” 

In a state­ment released May 25, Romano said that California should take imme­di­ate steps to reduce the num­ber of peo­ple on the nation’s largest death row of 700 men and women, while mov­ing towards full repeal. Those steps, he said, includ­ed com­mut­ing exist­ing death sen­tences; reach­ing non-cap­i­tal set­tle­ments in pend­ing cap­i­tal appeals; recall­ing exist­ing death sen­tences and mod­i­fy­ing them to life with­out parole; amend­ing the law to give retroac­tive effect to state’s Racial Justice Act, lim­it­ing the reach of the state’s felony-mur­der spe­cial cir­cum­stance, and restor­ing judi­cial dis­cre­tion to dis­miss spe­cial cir­cum­stances; and remov­ing men­tal­ly incom­pe­tent pris­on­ers from death row. 

In March 2021 the Committee heard pre­sen­ta­tions from death-penal­ty schol­ars Carol and Jordan Steiker, sib­lings who respec­tive­ly teach at Harvard Law School and University of Texas at Austin School of Law, Elisabeth Semel, the direc­tor of UC Berkeley’s Death Penalty Clinic, and UCLA Law pro­fes­sor Sherod Thaxton, among oth­ers, on con­sti­tu­tion­al issues and issues of inno­cence, costs, racial and geo­graph­ic bias, and men­tal health relat­ed to cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment. It also received sub­mis­sions from the California District Attorneys Association, the Prosecutors Alliance of California, the California Innocence Coalition, and the Office of the State Public Defender.

The staff mem­o­ran­dum found ​“a myr­i­ad of prob­lems with the admin­is­tra­tion of the death penal­ty in California,” as a result of which, ​“in prac­tice it does not serve a legit­i­mate peno­log­i­cal pur­pose.” ​“In the face of this over­whelm­ing real­i­ty, con­tin­u­ing to sen­tence peo­ple to death and con­tin­u­ing to house more than 700 peo­ple on death row under­mines the legit­i­ma­cy of our entire crim­i­nal jus­tice sys­tem,” the memorandum said.