Report: Proposal Billed as Speeding Up California Executions Would Actually Be Costly, Time-Consuming

An initiative on the California ballot this November billed by its supporters as a reform alternative to abolishing the state’s death penalty will cost the state tens of millions of dollars to implement, according to an analysis by the Alarcón Advocacy Center at Loyola Law School, and “will not speed up executions.”

The report, California Votes 2016: An Analysis of the Competing Death Penalty Ballot Initiatives, predicts that Proposition 66 (The Death Penalty Reform and Savings Act of 2016), would “cost millions more than the [state’s] already expensive death penalty system” and “will only make matters worse by creating more delays and further clogging the state’s over-burdened court system,” adding “layers of appeals to a system already facing an insurmountable backlog of decades of death penalty appeals waiting to be decided.”

The report states that provisions in Prop 66 to exempt lethal injection protocols from public oversight “will certainly be subject to litigation … on constitutional and other grounds, should Prop 66 pass, adding yet more delays to death penalty cases.” It criticizes Prop 66 as “fail[ing] to make the constitutional changes required to deliver the results it promises” and concludes that “its proposals are so convoluted that they are likely to create many new problems that will not only complicate the administration of the death penalty system, but will also impact and harm the rest of California’s legal system.” The report contrasts Prop 66 with an opposing ballot initiative, Proposition 62 (The Justice That Works Act of 2016), which would abolish the death penalty in favor of life without parole.

According to the state Legislative Analyst, Prop 66 will cost “tens of millions of dollars per year,” while Prop 62 would save California taxpayers $150 million per year. The authors of the Loyola report, Paula Mitchell, executive director of the Alarcón Advocacy Center, and Nancy Haydt, a board member of California Attorneys for Criminal Justice, summarize the issues before the voters as follows: “The proponents of both Prop 62 and Prop 66 agree that California’s death penalty system is dysfunctional, exorbitantly expensive, and failing to achieve its purpose. Prop 62 responds to this failed system by replacing it entirely, adapting the existing regime of life imprisonment without parole to cover all persons who are convicted of murder with special circumstances. Prop 66 responds to this failure with a sweeping array of convoluted proposed ‘fixes.’ Our detailed analysis reveals that most of these changes will actually make the death penalty system worse, and will result in its problems negatively impacting the rest of the legal system in California.”