Suggestions for fixing potholes on the slow road to death in California
Yesterday the Los Angeles Times had this article, entitled “Judge takes on death row gridlock,” which details the delays in the death row appeals in California in discussing a recent law review commentary on this topic by a Ninth Circuit judge. Here is the start of the LA Times piece:
The death penalty system in California is so backed up that the state would have to execute five prisoners a month for the next 10 years just to clear the prisoners already on death row.
The average wait for execution in the state is 17.2 years, twice the national figure. And the backlog is likely to grow, considering the trend: Thirty people have been on death row for more than 25 years, 119 for more than 20 years and 408 for more than a decade.
These statistics were cited by an influential judge in a recent article, one in a small but growing number of critiques of California’s death penalty machinery, which has proved to be so clogged that one jurist has called capital punishment in the state an illusion.
Arthur L. Alarcon, a veteran judge on the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals in Los Angeles, supports capital punishment and has voted in favor of death sentences more often than he has voted against them. His article in the Southern California Law Review is drawing considerable attention, not least because, unlike many critics, he does not blame delays on defense lawyers or liberal judges.
Rather, he has called for a radical overhaul of what he described as systemic problems, including a critical shortage of defense lawyers to represent death row inmates on appeal and an inefficient use of judicial resources. Alarcon suggested a major infusion of cash to attract lawyers to the difficult cases. He also proposed shifting automatic judicial review of death penalty cases to the state’s appeals courts.
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UPDATE: Thanks to DPIC, I can now provide this link to Judge Alarcon’s article.