OUTLIER COUNTIES: Los Angeles County Has Nation’s Largest — And Still Expanding — Death Row

Los Angeles County, California is the home of the nation’s largest death row, one that statistics show continues to rapidly grow. In January 2013, Los Angeles was responsible for more death row prisoners than any other county in the United States, and it has ranked as one of the two most prolific counties in imposing new death sentences each year since. The 31 death sentences imposed in the county between 2010 and 2015 are more than any other U.S. county imposed during that period and the four death sentences it has imposed so far in 2016 are more than have been imposed in any other county.

According to the Fair Punishment Project report, Too Broken to Fix, the Los Angeles death sentences exhibit serious racial disparities: 94% of the 31 death sentences imposed between 2010 and 2015 were directed at defendants of color. Although African Americans commit fewer than one-third of all Los Angeles County homicides, they comprised 42% of those condemned to death in this period. 45% of the new death sentences were imposed on Latino defendants, 6% against Asian Americans or Asian Pacific Islanders. Only two death sentences were imposed on White defendants during this period.

Not surprisingly, a 2014 study found that White jurors in southern California were significantly more likely to recommend death sentences for Latino defendants than White defendants, especially when only weak mitigating evidence was presented. But that is precisely what the evidence suggests occurs in many Los Angeles County capital cases.

The Los Angeles County Public Defender’s Office, which handles half of all capital cases in the county, assigns its most experienced attorneys to death penalty cases and its clients are rarely sentenced to death. Of the 30 Los Angeles County death penalty appeals decided by the California Supreme Court between 2006 and 2015, just one defendant was represented by the public defender’s office and three clients of the Alternate Public Defender, which takes about 20% of cases, were sentenced to death. However, court appointed attorneys—who handle the remaining 30% of capital defendants—accounted for 26 death verdicts, or 87% of the death sentences imposed in the county.

While the public defenders presented one week’s worth of mitigating evidence in the one case in which their client was sentenced to death, private attorneys averaged just 2.4 days of mitigation on their cases in the same period, including a number of cases in which they presented less than a day of mitigating evidence.

Two Former Los Angeles County District Attorneys, Gil Garcetti and John Van de Camp, have changed their views on the death penalty and spoken out about the risk of executing innocent people, the high cost of capital punishment, and the emotional toll on victims’ families. (Click to enlarge map.)