OUTLIER COUNTIES: Kern County, California Leads Nation in Police Killings, Ranks Among Highest in Death Sentences

Kern County, California—one of five Southern California coun­ties that have been described as the ​“new Death Belt” — sent six peo­ple to death row between 2006 and 2015, more than 99.4% of U.S. coun­ties. Its death sen­tence-to-homi­cide rate dur­ing the 10-year-peri­od from 2006 to 2015 also was 2.3 times high­er than in the rest of the state. In this same time frame, Kern had the high­est rate of civil­ians killed by police of any coun­ty in the coun­try: between 2005 and 2015, police killed 79 peo­ple in Kern County, a rate of 0.9 killings per year per 100,000 residents. 

In The Washington Post, Radley Balko explained the pol­i­cy link between high rates of police killings and high use of the death penal­ty, not­ing that District Attorneys set the tone for law enforce­ment in their coun­ties and are usu­al­ly in charge of inves­ti­gat­ing exces­sive use of force by police. ​“It isn’t dif­fi­cult to see how when a DA takes a ​‘win at all costs’ approach to fight­ing crime, that phi­los­o­phy would per­me­ate an entire county’s law enforce­ment appa­ra­tus, from the beat cop to the DA her­self or him­self,” Balko said. 

In Kern County, police killings and high num­bers of death sen­tences are part of a larg­er nar­ra­tive of offi­cial mis­con­duct. Ed Jagels, the long­time District Attorney in Kern County, led the cam­paign to oust Chief Justice Rose Bird and two oth­er Justices from the California Supreme Court over their votes in death penal­ty cas­es. He boast­ed about Kern lead­ing the state of California in incar­cer­a­tion rate. A large­ly-fab­ri­cat­ed sex abuse scan­dal led to 26 exon­er­a­tions. Prosecutors have been found to have altered inter­ro­ga­tion tran­scripts and hid­den unfa­vor­able blood test results. 

According to Harvard University’s Fair Punishment Project, cur­rent District Attorney Lisa Green ​“promised to con­tin­ue to be an exam­ple of aggres­sive pros­e­cu­tion” when she took over in 2010. Saying that for some cap­i­tal defen­dants ​“Justice … is noth­ing less than death,” she advo­cat­ed for a state ref­er­en­dum lim­it­ing death penalty appeals. 

Ineffective defense lawyer­ing has also con­tributed to Kern’s high death sen­tenc­ing rate. In one par­tic­u­lar­ly egre­gious case, a defense attor­ney emailed his co-coun­sel before the sen­tenc­ing phase of a cap­i­tal tri­al, say­ing, ​“I don’t know what a penal­ty tri­al real­ly looks like — it’s start­ing to con­cern me.” Though half of Kern’s defen­dants sen­tenced to death from 2010 – 2015 had intel­lec­tu­al dis­abil­i­ty, brain dam­age, or men­tal ill­ness, defense lawyers pre­sent­ed an aver­age of less than 3 days’ worth of evi­dence to spare the defen­dan­t’s life. In numer­ous cas­es, lawyers pre­sent­ed a day or less of mitigating evidence.