Is Death Row worth the cost?
25-year process at $138 million a year has some questioning 'dysfunctional' system
Published: Friday, October 23, 2009 at 3:00 a.m.
Last Modified: Friday, October 23, 2009 at 10:06 p.m.
Ramon Salcido, the Sonoma Valley winery worker who slashed and shot seven people to death in 1989, probably will be in his 60s before the state of California executes him — if it ever does.
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Richard Allen Davis, convicted in the 1993 kidnapping and murder of 12-year-old Polly Klaas of Petaluma.
Salcido, 48, like many of the other 680 convicted killers on Death Row at San Quentin State Prison, is likely to die behind bars of natural causes, rather than the lethal injection prescribed by a jury two decades ago.
Both he and Richard Allen Davis, 55, who snatched Polly Klaas from her Petaluma bedroom in 1993, are mired in a capital punishment system that costs taxpayers about $138 million a year and yields scant results.
Executions will remain on hold at least until next year, pending resolution of legal questions about California’s three-drug death cocktail. For now, only five inmates have exhausted the labyrinthine appeals process and are eligible for execution.
At its current pace — having carried out 13 executions in the past 31 years — California would take about 1,600 years to clear the current population on Death Row.
Salcido and Davis, two of the most notorious killers in modern California history, already lag years behind the 25-year timetable for moving from conviction to execution, and no one knows when it might be completed for either man.
“If they have not been executed then justice has not been served,” said Marc Klaas, Polly’s father, who heads a Sausalito-based foundation dedicated to child safety. “The sooner my daughter’s killer is executed the better I will feel.”
Klaas said he senses a nationwide shift against the death penalty, including a nine-year moratorium in Illinois and abolition by New York, New Jersey and New Mexico in the past two years. He blames a “vocal minority” of death penalty opponents, including defense lawyers, “activist” judges and “apologists for their cause.”
Davis, a career criminal who set animals on fire as a child, enraged California with his kidnap and murder of Polly Klaas, prompting adoption of the three strikes law in 1994.
“The case ripped everybody’s heart out,” said Chris Andrian, a Santa Rosa criminal defense attorney.
Interest in Salcido’s rampage, which included cutting the throats of his three daughters, was rekindled by his surviving daughter, Carmina Salcido, 23, whose book came out this month. She told her story to a nationwide TV audience Oct. 16.
No one deserves to die more than Salcido and Davis, who have expressed no remorse for their callous crimes, Andrian said. But he rejected the eye-for-an-eye principle behind the death penalty.
“I don’t think it’s an appropriate response from a civilized society,” he said.
A state blue ribbon commission report on criminal justice last year layered economic considerations onto the long-standing moral debate over capital punishment.
Citing the 25-year delay in implementing death sentences — twice the national average — the report labeled California’s death penalty law “dysfunctional,” calling it “the law in name only, and not in reality.”
The California Commission on the Fair Administration of Justice’s 196-page report noted that Death Row swelled from seven inmates in 1978 to 670 in 2007, while just 13 were executed.
It said: “The reality is that most California death sentences are actually sentences of lifetime incarceration. The defendant will die in prison before he or she is ever executed.”
For about $126 million a year less in costs for prosecution, incarceration and handling legal appeals, California could get the “same result” by sentencing murderers to life without the possibility of parole, the report said.
The only recent Death Row fatality was Thomas Francis Edwards, killer of a 12-year-old Orange County girl in 1981, who died of natural causes in February at age 65.
“The system simply isn’t working,” said former Attorney General John Van de Kamp, who chaired the commission and now advocates doing away with the death penalty.
Confinement on Death Row costs $90,000 a year more than normal incarceration, a premium that currently totals more than $60 million a year. Compounding the financial burden is Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s push to build a $400 million expansion of Death Row, which critics say will be at capacity three years after it is built.
“It’s a staggering amount of money,” said Assemblyman Jared Huffman, D-San Rafael, who is fighting the proposed expansion. “I would argue we’re getting zero value. Permanent incarceration will keep us just as safe.”
Klaas rejects the idea that capital punishment should be based on a budget. “This is a primary duty of our government,” he said.
A life sentence leaves open the possibility a convicted killer might some day be released, Klaas said. Meanwhile, it gives men like Davis, who has spent much of his adult life in prison, “exactly what they want,” he said.
Davis, Salcido and five other men have been sentenced to death between 1984 and 2000 for murders committed in Sonoma, Mendocino and Lake counties. All are still involved in appeals which must, by law, go through the California Supreme Court, federal courts and ultimately the U.S. Supreme Court.
The first step, certifying the death sentence by the state high court, typically comes in about 10 years, the commission report said.
Davis’ conviction was upheld in June, 13 years after the jury’s verdict. Salcido’s case is moving even slower, with the Supreme Court action coming in 2008, 18 years after his conviction.
The federal appeals process typically takes 15 years. Salcido’s attorney, Conrad Petermann, said it is “impossible” to say when they might be completed.
The California Attorney General’s Office is currently handling 496 death penalty appeals at the state level and 144 in the federal courts, said Christine Gasparac, spokeswoman.
California’s capital punishment system is essentially gridlocked, with too few lawyers and too little money to handle that volume, the commission said. It would cost nearly $100 million to boost both prosecuting and defense legal staffs to expedite the appeals process, it said.
Replacing the death penalty with mandatory lifetime incarceration would cut the system’s costs to less than $12 million a year, the commission said.
State Sen. Tom Harman, R-Huntington Beach, who is running for attorney general, blames the dysfunction on “legal maneuverings that would try the patience of Job.” If the Legislature doesn’t fix it, voters will, he said.
Andrian, who is involved in a death penalty appeal from Marin County, said that a defense attorney is ethically obliged to “exhaust every remedy” for the sake of preventing a wrongful execution.
“You can’t have that on your hands,” he said.
Those who want to maintain California’s death penalty should be willing to raise taxes to pay for it, Andrian said. “I think it’s about resources; it’s not about bleeding hearts.”
News researcher Teresa Meikle contributed to this report. You can reach Staff Writer Guy Kovner at 521-5457 or guy.kovner@pressdemocrat.com.
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