More evidence of the sad perversity of California’s administration of the death penalty

As the title of this post reveals, I have now decided that the best adjectives to describe the administration of the quasi-dormant death penalty in California are sad and perverse.  This new local article, headlined “Serial killer’s death sentence revives capital punishment debate,” highlights why:

In 1977, 19-year-old Larry Roggasch cracked open a six-pack of beer, pouring three on his little sister’s freshly covered grave in their native San Jose, and made a promise: He would see that the man who raped, strangled and dumped her on a Marin County hillside be punished.

Thirty-six years later, judgment day looms for serial killer Joseph Naso, who at age 79 will become the oldest person ever sentenced to death in California when a judge next month pronounces his penalty for the murders of 18-year-old Roxene Roggasch and three other Northern California prostitutes.

But Larry Roggasch doesn’t know whether he can bear to watch Naso receive what seems to him a hollow sentence. With an ongoing moratorium on executions in California and hundreds of convicted murderers awaiting capital punishment, there is virtually no chance the state will ever put Naso to death.

“It’s a joke; he’s never going to be executed,” said Roggasch, a 56-year-old commercial fisherman. “He’s going to live out the rest of his life safe and comfortable in his own cell on death row. That’s why I want him to go to mainline prison,” Roggasch continued. “He needs to suffer, like them — not just my sister, all of them.”

In California, the death penalty appeals process takes so long that men half Naso’s age on death row are more likely to die of natural causes or kill themselves than be executed by the state. And while they wait on San Quentin State Prison’s death row, they lead a relatively comfortable existence, with single cells and access to the best attorneys fighting for prisoners’ rights.

But on the heels of voters narrowly choosing to preserve the death penalty last year, California’s district attorneys and peace officers are readying a proposition for the 2014 ballot that they say would expedite executions once the state lifts its moratorium on lethal injection drugs. Among those spearheading the effort are District Attorneys Steve Wagstaffe of San Mateo County, Jeff Rosen of Santa Clara County and Mark Peterson, whose Contra Costa County territory has been the scene of death penalty defendants mocking the threat of capital punishment in recent years.

“Some individuals facing murder charges would prefer the death penalty to life without parole because they believe the conditions on death row are better than among the general population,” said Larry Barnes, a private defense attorney and death penalty expert. “They harbor the opinion that with some 720 men on death row, unless they are very young, they don’t stand a chance of being executed.”

Such was the case with Richmond-San Rafael Bridge toll plaza killer Nathan Burris, who practically begged Contra Costa County jurors to give him the death penalty at his trial last year for the jealousy-fueled ambush killing of his ex-girlfriend and her friend.

“If I was in Texas, I’d be terrified,” Burris said from the witness stand in 2012. “California is not real. The death penalty means nothing to me but time to hang out and do what I’m going to do.”

In the same courtroom three years earlier, Edward Wycoff received the death penalty for the ambush slayings of his sister and brother-in-law in El Cerrito. He told jurors that he deserved an award, not the death penalty, but still wanted the one-to-a-cell status that death row provides.

Between California resuming executions in 1992 and the beginning of the state’s judicially imposed moratorium in 2006, just 13 men who exhausted their appeals have been executed. The California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation counts 722 men and 20 women currently on death row, nearly 300 of whom have had their sentences affirmed by the Supreme Court. Experts say it takes 12 years on average for condemned inmates in California to exhaust their appeals, more than twice the national average for death penalty states.

Meanwhile, the costs mount; by one estimate, the state has spent more than $4 billion on death penalty trials, appeals and incarceration since 1978. “The death penalty process is broken, there is no dispute about that,” said Peterson, who is part of Californians for Death Penalty Reform and Savings, a coalition of district attorneys, law enforcement professionals and victims’ rights advocates in the process of raising $1.7 million to get on the November 2014 ballot an initiative they believe would cut the appeal process in half and save the state hundreds of millions of dollars a year….

But Ana Zamora, senior policy advocate at the American Civil Liberties Union of Northern California, said Peterson and his coalition face “a serious uphill battle.  The death penalty system is so broken beyond repair, there is no fixing the system that won’t cost millions and millions and won’t put at risk executing innocent people,” she said.

In the meantime, San Quentin’s death row more and more resembles a geriatric ward. Killer and serial rapist Darryl Kemp currently holds the distinction as the oldest person to be sentenced to death in advance of Naso’s Nov. 8 sentencing. Kemp was 73 when he slept through his 2009 trial and sentencing for the rape and murder of a Lafayette mother three decades earlier.

It was the second death sentence for Kemp, who killed just four months after he was released from San Quentin in 1978 after a California Supreme Court ruling that made capital punishment unconstitutional and commuted all death sentences to life in prison with the possibility of parole. Today, at age 77, Kemp is in the preliminary stage of his appeal that will stretch for years.

I would like to believe that some kind of successful initiative campaign in California could somehow succeed in making the state’s death penalty system less sad and perverse. But I suspect and fear that it is the deep ambivalence of California’s populace, politicians and population of lawyers concerning a truly functional capital punishment system that has led to the current mess, and I doubt any set of formal legal changes are likely to be able to effectively transform the system’s sad and perverse realities anytime soon.