In just a few short weeks, on Presidents’ Day weekend, more than 1,000 criminal defense attorneys, investigators and experts will gather at Monterey Conference Center, as they have for 25 years, to hone their skills in death penalty cases. 


It is hoped, however, that this year will be the last, as many of the attendees join others in supporting the SAFE California Act, a voter initiative that calls for replacing the death penalty with life without the possibility of parole. The push for signature-gathering to put SAFE California on the November ballot is in its final stages, and polls show a majority of Californians support the measure.


In the early 1980s, when California’s death penalty (reinstated in 1977-78) was just gearing up, the seminar was a far more modest gathering of a few hundred people, and could be held at the much cozier confines of Asilomar Conference Grounds. But with thousands of capitally-charged cases over the years and a growing death row population (now more than 700 – twice as many as any other state), a much larger facility was required to accommodate the expanding number of lawyers, paralegals, mitigation specialists, investigators and experts needed to ensure that cases with such high stakes are provided competent representation. The expansion of the conference reflects the enormous costs in maintaining what has been described by judges, former wardens and prosecutors as a bloated, broken, wasteful system.


CALIFORNIA’S DEATH ROW POPULATION IS NOW MORE THAN 700.


If there is to be a death penalty, then defense teams must be funded sufficiently so they can develop and challenge evidence. Judges and juries making life-and-death decisions must be adequately informed about the circumstances of the crime as well as the defendant’s background. But this doesn’t come cheaply, and together with the prosecution’s costs – whose resources outstrip the defense’s – and housing death row inmates, the tab comes close to $200 million a year, according to recent study.


And for what? The report, by Arthur Alarcon, long-time judge of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeal, and law professor Paula Mitchell, concluded that “since reinstating the death penalty in 1978, California taxpayers have spent roughly $4 billion to fund a dysfunctional death penalty system that has carried out no more than 13 executions.” As the California Commission for the Fair Administration of Justice concluded after its extensive review in 2008, death sentences are unlikely ever to be carried out (with extremely rare exceptions) because of a process “plagued with excessive delay” in the appointment of post-conviction counsel and a “severe backlog” in the California Supreme Court’s review of death judgments. According to CCFAJ’s report, the lapse of time from death sentence to execution constitutes the longest delay of any death-penalty state.


This has led Tani Cantil-Sakauye, after one year as the Chief Justice of the State of California, to conclude that the state’s capital punishment system is “not effective” and requires “structural changes” that the state cannot afford. Her predecessor, Ron George, who was chief justice for 15 years, came to the same conclusion, describing California’s death penalty scheme as “dysfunctional.”


A recent New York Times editorial explained that “California’s system of government-hobbled-by-referendum” means that the only way to replace the death penalty is by a voter initiative. If the SAFE California Act (www.safecalifornia.org) passes in November, it will replace California’s death penalty with life imprisonment and require those convicted of murder to pay restitution to victim families. It will also set aside $100 million for the investigation of unsolved rape and murder cases.


A benefit for the SAFE California Act campaign happens Saturday, Feb. 18, 6-8pm, at the Portola Hotel & Spa. Speakers will include two of the most dedicated and eloquent death-penalty lawyers in the country, Steve Bright and Bryan Stephenson, as well as Jason Baldwin, one of the wrongfully convicted West Memphis Three.


It is not as ironic as it may seem that capital defense practitioners who have devoted their lives and careers to death penalty cases are trying to make their jobs obsolete. They have experienced firsthand the unfairness, arbitrariness and unreliability of California’s capital punishment scheme. They know that the imposition of death sentences does nothing to make us safer, and they understand that the resources wasted on this broken system can be far better used during this time of fiscal crisis. And they will happily do without the intensity and unrelenting pressure of litigating cases that are literally a matter of life and death – even if it means finding a new line of work. 


ANDREW LOVE is a Bay Area lawyer who has represented death row inmates for 23 years and has co-chaired the Capital Case Defense Seminar planning committee. He blogs at fairandunbalancedblog.blogspot.com.