Death is for the living
Study finds capital punishment without executions is an expensive form of life without parole
By Jake Armstrong 10/29/2009
Deborah Bush is still a needle’s length away from the justice she was promised after three reputed gang members gunned down her 14-year-old son, Stephen Coats Jr., and two other boys 16 years ago this Saturday.
But the wheels of justice turn slowly, and Bush was assured of that when the three murderers, who shot the boys in a deadly case of mistaken identity, were sentenced to die. One day those wheels may stop turning, Bush and her family hope. “If that day comes, I think that we’ll probably be there [at the execution],” said Bush, a civilian employee with the Pasadena Police Department. “My children — who are now grown — I’m sure they are waiting for justice to be carried out for their brother.”
So, too, are other families in Pasadena and across the state that have seen the similar promise of justice in their loved ones’ deaths collide with a capital punishment system a blue-ribbon state commission has described as dysfunctional. Now, with executions in California nearly four years into an indefinite hold while the state revamps lethal injection procedures deemed unconstitutional, debate is reigniting over the value of a system that rarely produces executions, costs taxpayers $135 million a year and — in the opinion of a majority of police chiefs in a new national report — is the least effective means of reducing crime.
The report, released last week by the Washington, DC-based Death Penalty Information Center, revealed that 57 percent of the 500 police chiefs surveyed agreed that the death penalty was ineffective in preventing violent crimes because criminals rarely consider the consequences of violence.
“This is an appropriate time to examine the death penalty as a pragmatic issue — to ask, is it working?” said DPIC Executive Director Richard C. Dieter, author of the report. “The death penalty without executions is a very expensive form of life without parole.”
In fact, the 685 condemned prisoners in California are far more likely to die outside of the execution chamber. Only 13 inmates have been executed since voters reinstated the death penalty in 1978, while 48 died of natural causes and 17 took their own lives. Nationwide, death sentences and executions have declined nearly 60 percent since 2000, according to DPIC.
But the cost issue is a tough sell for the survivors of crime victims. “I can assure you the people that have that opinion have not been in these shoes,” Bush said. “All I want is to have is a child to grow old with me. I can’t imagine anyone saying that is worth X amount of dollars.”
Conversely, Dieter challenges whether the few executions that have taken place in recent years are worth the amount spent on all capital cases in a time of fiscal crisis. The study found death penalty cases cost significantly more to prosecute but only result in death sentences 10 percent of the time. States pay about $1 million more for a death penalty trial that a non-death penalty trial. Since only one-third of capital cases end with a death sentence, the cost of that lone death sentence becomes $3 million. But only one in 10 capital cases results in an execution, pushing the total cost of pursuing executions to $30 million, according to the DPIC study.
Four men convicted of slayings in Pasadena await their fate on Death Row. Several others are currently in trials that potentially could send them there, as well.
Karl Holmes, Herbert McClain and Lorenzo Newborn, sentenced in 1997 for the “Halloween murders” of Coats, Edgar Evans and Reggie Crawford, are currently appealing their convictions. Albert Cunningham awaits death for killing and robbing Carmen Treto at Pasadena’s Pair of Aces bar in 1985.
Johnl Dvon Reynolds is currently on trial for murder and other charges that could send him to death row in the shooting death of 16-year-old Ebony Huel outside a Pasadena teen nightclub in 2007. A jury on Nov. 4 will start a second round of deliberations on a death sentence for Ignacio Cervantes Chavez, convicted in the 2000 murder of Olivia de la Torre, owner of Pasadena’s La Guadalupana market. The first round of the penalty phase ended in a mistrial in May, according to Sandi Gibbons, spokeswoman for the Los Angeles County District Attorney’s office. Chavez is already serving life in prison for a 1999 murder.
Given the complexity of prosecuting and defending capital punishment cases, the DPIC study also found there was little that can be done to reduce costs without endangering the constitutional rights of the accused. DPIC advocates having life without parole as the maximum possible sentence. In fact, that’s one of the only things Bush says she can count on.
“The only justice that I’m assured is life without parole. That’s the only justice in there,” she said. “It’s comforting to me to know that they’re not going to be on the street terrorizing someone else.”
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