WSJ – Costs Test Backing For Death Penalty Some Former Supporters Say Capital Punishment Isn’t Worth Huge Sums Spent on Drawn-Out Cases; Californians to Vote
By ASHBY JONES and STEVE EDER
Opponents of the death penalty are finding some unlikely allies: tough-on-crime types concerned about its cost.
Some longtime supporters of the death penalty now think the punishment should be scrapped, even as they continue to see it as a just option in heinous crimes and as an effective deterrent. They are questioning whether the occasional execution is worth the taxpayer money spent on lengthy appeals and costly lawyers for inmates, especially at a time when state budgets are strained.
Emily Berl for The Wall Street JournalNinth Circuit Judge Arthur Alarcón, outside federal court in Los Angeles, says he is conflicted about the death penalty now, because of its costs.
This consideration is particularly keen in California, where a referendum to abolish the death penalty will appear on the ballot in November. Politicians in more conservative states also are taking another look at capital punishment, on cost grounds.
“I was a supporter and believer in the death penalty, but I’ve begun to see that this system doesn’t work and it isn’t functional,” said Gil Garcetti, a Democrat who served for eight years as district attorney in Los Angeles County, which is responsible for roughly one-third of California’s 727 death-row inmates. “It costs an obscene amount of money.”
Wash. Post – Louisiana death-row inmate Damon Thibodeaux exonerated with DNA evidence
By Douglas A. Blackmon, Published: September 28
NEW ORLEANS — A little after 4 a.m. on July 21, 1996, Damon Thibodeaux, a deckhand on a Mississippi River workboat, cracked at the end of a nine-hour interrogation and confessed to the brutal rape and murder of his 14-year-old step-cousin, Crystal Champagne.
“I didn’t know that I had done it,” Thibodeaux said at one point, according to a police transcript. “But I done it.”
Before that day was over, Thibodeaux had recanted his confession, telling his court-appointed lawyer that he told police what they wanted to hear in response to threats of death by lethal injection and his grief over the death of his cousin. Nonetheless, Thibodeaux was later convicted of both crimes and sentenced to die.
Now, after more than 15 years spending 23 hours a day in solitary confinement on death row at Louisiana’s Angola prison farm, Thibodeaux is free.
Daily CA – District attorney and former warden debate death penalty on campus
By Jacob Brown | Staff
Hundreds of students packed Wheeler Auditorium Wednesday to hear a debate between the Contra Costa County district attorney and a former prison warden on Proposition 34, a ballot measure that aims to end California’s death penalty at the polls in November.
The debate was between former San Quentin State Prison warden Jeanne Woodford and District Attorney Mark Peterson and was this week’s presentation for the campus course Political Science 179, Haas professor Alan Ross’s undergraduate colloquium on political science.
Prop. 34 will replace all mentions of the death sentence in California law with a life sentence without parole. The proposition aims to save a billion dollars over the next five years, which will be reallocated toward investigating unsolved crimes.