State’s attitude toward death penalty changed

The death penalty runs like a sinuous thread through California politics.

The issue bedeviled two governors named Brown, Pat and his son, Jerry, whose Catholic faith weighed heavily on their stewardship of the state’s execution chamber. In 1986, a public outcry resulted in the recall of three Supreme Court justices who repeatedly barred the door and kept the chamber sealed shut.

For decades candidates vied to out-tough one another on the issue, even if it required the skills of an acrobat, professing moral opposition to capital punishment while vowing to vigorously enforce the law and ensure that California’s most heinous denizens were sent to their death. (Never mind that executions were rarer than the appearance of major comets.)

Gradually, the politics shifted. In 2012, San Francisco District Attorney Kamala Harris was elected attorney general, the state’s top law enforcement officer, running as an avowed foe of capital punishment. (Even as she refused to take a stand on a ballot measure that sought to end the death penalty and replace it with life in prison without parole.)

Nothing, however, underscores the political sea change so much as Gov. Gavin Newsom’s current search for a new attorney general. The

Democrat, who already had the chance to fill Harris’ Senate seat after she became vice president, will choose the successor to Xavier Becerra if, as expected, he is confirmed this week as secretary of Health and Human Services.

Newsom, who declared a moratorium on executions soon after taking office, is considering some of the state’s leading death penalty critics to replace Becerra, who shares his opposition to capital punishment. If anything, support for the death penalty may be a detriment to those hankering after the appointment.

“The politics have changed,” said Bob Shrum, a former Democratic campaign strategist who directs the Center for the Political Future at USC. “So has the composition of the electorate.”

He would know. In 1990, Shrum’s candidate for governor, Attorney General John Van de Kamp, lost the Democratic nomination to former San Francisco Mayor Dianne Feinstein, who used her strong prodeath penalty stance to bludgeon Van de Kamp, one of those who tried to square the circle by pledging to set aside his personal opposition and support capital punishment.

It was a different time. In 1988, George H.W. Bush carried California for Republicans for the sixth straight presidential election. The state’s center of political gravity was much closer to the middle, allowing a relative moderate like Feinstein to capture the Democratic gubernatorial nomination.

In 1990, nearly 8 in 10 Californians supported capital punishment, according to a Los Angeles Times Poll. By 2019, that number had declined to just over 6 in 10 in a UC Berkeley survey.

Even so, in the last decade, voters have twice rejected state ballot measures to end capital punishment, with 52% opposed in 2012 and 53% voting no in 2016. To Kim Nalder, who directs the Project for an Informed Electorate at Cal State Sacramento, the outcome reflects a deep ambivalence about using the machinery of government to snuff out a human life.

In 2018, seeking reelection to the Senate and facing a challenge from the left, Feinstein revealed that she, too, had rethought her position. “Several years ago I changed my view of the death penalty,” she said. “It became crystal clear to me that the risk of unequal application is high and its effect on deterrence is low.”

It’s hard to see any statewide candidate running and winning in today’s environment by championing capital punishment, even if voters aren’t ready to shut San Quentin’s execution chamber once and for all.