A rush to shortcut justice
The mountain of tortured reasoning sustaining America’s death penalty grew a little higher this week as California’s highest court upheld a measure designed to expedite executions. California voters were presented with an absurd choice last fall in the form of simultaneous ballot initiatives: whether to abolish capital punishment or start killing people faster. They narrowly chose the latter.
So the state Supreme Court faced a democratic whim that is not only antithetical to the fair administration of justice but also likely to overwhelm the justices with backlogged capital cases to the exclusion of other business. Rather than strike it down on those grounds, the court strained to rescue the initiative by declaring that it doesn’t say what it says.
The court found that the hard fiveyear appeals deadline at the heart of Proposition 66, rather than the unconstitutional abridgment of defendants’ rights that was sold to voters, is merely an aspirational goal — a sort of executioner’s mission statement. The majority opinion, by Justice Carol Corrigan, dubiously recasts this killby date as “an exhortation to the parties and the courts to handle cases as expeditiously as is consistent with the fair and principled administration of justice.”
The ruling clears the way for the initiative’s other questionable steps to speed executions: compelling more lawyers to accept death penalty defendants, expanding appellate reviews from the Supreme Court to the lower courts, and curtailing the approval process for execution methods. While it’s not clear whether any of that will shorten the appeals process for most of the 748 prisoners on San Quentin’s Death Row, the ruling could, after a hiatus of more than a decade since the last execution, restart the countdown for 18 prisoners who have exhausted their appeals.
Life imprisonment offers an equally effective and less costly response to the worst crimes — as well as one that can be undone, as more than 150 convictions yielding a death sentence have been. It’s the thoroughly tested standard in the rest of the free world and more than 20 states that have officially ended or suspended capital punishment. For those wondering where the alternative march toward a more expeditious death penalty might lead, Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson offered a helpful demonstration in April, executing four prisoners in eight days in a mad rush to use the state’s expiring supply of an increasingly scarce lethal drug.
The death penalty purports to answer a will to punish the most heinous crimes. This impulse, however, is bound to be frustrated by the legal challenges that are the inevitable consequence of the penalty’s immorality, arbitrariness, and irreversibility. That’s how Californians and the high court arrived at a choice between abolition and acceleration. Gov. Jerry Brown, a once-outspoken opponent of capital punishment who has been spared the prospect of an execution during either of his tenures, may yet have an opportunity to choose more wisely.