Newsom move effectively ends death penalty in U.S.
On Wednesday, California Gov. Gavin Newsom announced a moratorium on the death penalty, saying he would grant reprieves to all 737 people on death row in San Quentin. The dismantling of the nation’s largest death row effectively ends the death penalty in America.
In the past, governors who declared a moratorium on the death penalty may have taken a political risk, but Newsom’s decision essentially cut the cord on a punishment that was already at the end of its rope.
While it is technically still on the books in most states, the death penalty is actually only imposed in a few isolated counties. In the mid-1990s, more than 300 people were sentenced to death each year in as many as 200 counties. By contrast, just 39 people were sentenced to death last year.
The causes of the decline in death sentencing run deep. One major factor has been improved defense lawyering. When ju- rors hear about mental health and other evidence about a defendant’s background, they are more likely to reject the death penalty.
Another reason is that the public is correctly concerned with the possibility of wrongful convictions, and not just in death penalty cases. Since 1989, more than 2,400 people have been exonerated, including at least 164 people who had been sentenced to the death penalty. We have no idea how many innocent people have been executed, but we do know the evidence was flimsy in many death penalty cases in the 1980s and 1990s.
In the abstract, people may be closely divided about whether they support the death penalty or not, but their views become more nuanced when faced with specific questions about the death penalty and its alternatives.
In a survey of nearly 500 Orange County jurors, Nicholas Scurich, Daniel Krauss and I found that even the most steadfast death penalty supporters were less inclined to sentence someone to death when told that California had not executed anyone in a decade. One-third of the jurors would not qualify for a capital jury because they opposed the death penalty on principle. We were surprised at how many jurors, conservative and liberal alike, said they would not convict a person of capital murder if they knew the death penalty might result, especially when you consider that state voters in 2016 narrowly rejected a proposition to end the death penalty.
The closing of California’s death row, America’s largest, has more than just symbolic importance. During the same time period that we created our largest death rows, we also created the highest rate of incarceration in the world. In recent years, a truly bipartisan coalition is seeking to reduce incarceration for many of the same reasons the death penalty has fallen out of favor: inhumanity of severe punishments, prevalence of wrongful convictions, enormous financial and societal costs, and the possibility for human rehabilitation and redemption.
Here again, California can point the way forward. Although a court order provided the impetus for change, in response the state reconsidered long sentences and pushed costs to the local level, reducing incarceration from a high of 163,000 state prisoners in 2006 to around 115,000 today. By following California’s lead and focusing on rehabilitation, defense lawyering, mental health screening and needs rather than revenge, the end of the death penalty can herald a new beginning for criminal justice in America.