What both sides can’t seem to agree on, though, is how to fix a broken system. And yes, there are two sides to this issue.
On one side, we have those people who unfailingly show up to protest any execution. These are the Prop 62 people. Their solution is to simply do away with the death penalty and deny the victims and their loved ones the justice they deserve.
On the other side are those tired of the interminable waiting and constant legal antics and roadblocks for sentences to be carried out and justice to be done. These are the Prop 66 people.
Right up front, I have to say that I whole-heartedly support Prop 66. You can stop reading now if you don’t care to know why.
These days California death row inmates are more likely to die of old age than be executed. Of the 864 prisoners sentenced to die since the California Supreme Court reinstated the death penalty in 1978, 119 died before being executed for their crimes, 71 by natural causes. In the US as a whole, the average length of time an inmate stays on death row has been climbing since a low of 71 months in 1985 to 198 months in 2011. Should it take 16-and-a-half years for victim’s families to see justice done?
No executions have occurred in California since Clarence Ray Allen’s execution in 2006 – a full 10 years! Although, one case, Alfredo Rolando Prieto, was sentenced to death in 1992 for a heinous San Bernardino County murder and extradited to Fairfax County, Virginia to stand trial for two murders he committed in 1998. Prieto was executed in Virginia in 2015.
Of the 746 prisoners currently on death row, 279 have exhausted appeals and the California Supreme Court has confirmed their sentence. In other words, these killers and the victim’s families are waiting for the prison system to get off their keisters and do the job California taxpayers are paying them to do.
In California, male death row prisoners are held in San Quentin, while female prisoners are sent to the Central California Women's Facility in Chowchilla. But all executions are currently authorized to be done at San Quentin.
Prop 62 has been tried, folks. In February 1972, the California Supreme Court found that the death penalty constituted cruel and unusual punishment under the California state constitution and 107 condemned inmates were re-sentenced to life with the possibility of parole and removed from California’s death row. Among those 107 were Charles Manson and his followers. Today Manson enjoys the comforts of the general prison population privileges and he and his followers regularly come up for parole hearings. Let me ask you, how safe would you feel with the Manson family on the streets, maybe even your neighbors?
In 1978, the people of California had had enough and overwhelmingly approved an initiative to restore the death penalty. Ever since then, there frequently appears on the ballot an initiative to end the death penalty. In 2012, a nearly verbatim Prop 62 initiative, Prop 34, went down in flames by a 58 to 42 percent vote.
If Prop 62 succeeds this year, there will be 746 people guilty of the most heinous capital crimes instantly thrown into the general prison population… and escaping the fair sentence of the courts. Justice will once again be thwarted.
