NEWSBYJAMES CLARK

While most of California is talking about repealing the state’s dysfunctional death penalty, prosecutors in Los Angeles seem blissfully unaware of the problems associated with all the men and women being sent to death row from their county.

While most counties in the state don’t seek the death penalty at all (some couldn’t afford it if they wanted to), LA continues to lead the pack of those that do – at an enormous expense to the county budget.

But now there is a groundswell of grassroots support for ending the wasteful policy of seeking death.

So far over 500 people have signed the petition and 25 organizations and community groups have passed the resolution calling on DA Steve Cooley to stop seeking death in LA County!

The ongoing debacle of California’s death penalty took a few dramatic turns last week: in the span of just a few days a new poll showed a shift in public opinion in favor of cutting the death penalty, Gov. Jerry Brown took the first step towards doing just that by cutting plans for a new death row, and the department of corrections announced that the state’s hold on executions will last at least through the year if not longer.

At the same time, the California Democratic Party pushed even farther in their advocacy against the death penalty.

All told, it’s got people asking: Is California finally ready to dump the death penalty?

If you’re one of the three people (other than my parents) who’ve read my change.org bio, you’ll already know that before I started campaigning for the repeal of California’s death penalty and sentencing reform in LA County, I spent a few years living in Atlanta, Georgia – home to Coca Cola, Cartoon Network, and a criminal justice system intent on executing a man who may well be innocent.

I’ve never met him, but Troy Anthony Davis, on Georgia’s death row since 1991 despite grave doubts concerning his guilt, is the reason I left the work I was pursuing in graduate school and devoted myself to working against the death penalty.

I remember the exact moment. In September 2008, I got a call from a classmate who knew I had been involved in human rights activism in the past. He asked if I’d ever heard of Troy Davis, and I confessed that I hadn’t. He told me he was scheduled to be executed in a few days and asked me to research the case and let him know if I wanted to get involved. When I got home, I Googled the name. I invite you to do the same.

California’s budget debacle is more dire than ever, so it’s no surprise that Governor Jerry Brown is hunkering down in search of solutions as he approaches the California Democratic Party’s state convention at the end of the month. But some of his fellow Democrats and a growing number of other organizations around the state are staring one budget solution in the face and just want Jerry to open his eyes: CUT THIS!

The state’s death penalty is an ineffective waste of tax dollars that we simply can’t afford, yet while the Governor and Assembly slash everything from preschool to geriatric care, the state remains poised to spend $1 billion on the death penalty over the next five years.

That’s a billion dollars that can be saved with a few strokes of the Governor’s pen – all he has to do is convert the death sentences of those awaiting execution to life without parole, and POOF! The death penalty is cut from the budget and California saves $1 billion without releasing a single prisoner.

While he’s been acting oblivious to this fact, plenty of others around the state aren’t. The ACLU, the League of Women Voters, and leaders in the California Democratic Party are alerting the Governor to this solution.

Thanks to Illinois, we now have more proof: ending the death penalty saves money - a lot of money - and quickly.

So what is California waiting for?

It’s less than a month since Illinois Governor Pat Quinn signed the death penalty repeal bill, replacing the death penalty with life without the possibility of parole and diverting the cost savings to victims’ services. Just two weeks later savings had already reached $4.7 million!

And that’s just the tip of the iceberg.

Some advocates of the death penalty say capital punishment serves family members of murder victims. Prosecutors like LA County’s Steve Cooley, one of the nation’s most prolific death penalty prosecutors, often claim they seek the death penalty because it provides victims’ family members with closure, though many crime victims and victims' advocates have questioned the myth of “closure” when it comes to the death of a loved one. But like every other justification for the death penalty, this theory often fails the test.

A growing number of victims’ advocacy organizations are taking a stand against the death penalty because it prioritizes executions above the real needs of victims. Groups like Murder Victims’ Families for Reconciliation, Murder Victims’ Families for Human Rights, and California Crime Victims for Alternatives to the Death Penalty have shown how the needs of victims are often shunted aside in favor of the politics of executions.

Another week has gone by and, naturally, that means another round of shocking revelations about the United States’ addiction to lethal injection drugs, evoking memories from Requiem for a Dream. This time, the latest recipient of a Public Records Act request from your friendly neighborhood ACLU lawyer is the FDA, the agency that earlier this month claimed it wasn’t its job to regulate drugs used in lethal injections.

The ACLU keeps uncovering more to the story, but each new revelation just raises more unanswered questions.

Months ago, when state officials first started reporting that they had gotten their hands on the lethal injection drug sodium thiopental despite a nationwide shortage, the ACLU of Northern California began filing a series of Public Records Act requests to find out exactly how -- and from where -- they had gotten it. The first request went to the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR), and after a few weeks of the CDCR illegally withholding the documents, the ACLU went to court, forcing the department to release a flood of documents with about as much big black marker as actual information. But in between those black marker redactions, the ACLU gleaned some incredible facts: CDCR had spent thousands of hours of staff time and tens of thousands of dollars on what they called a “secret mission” to find the drug anywhere in the world and procure it at any cost.

In the midst of a months-long shortage of the lethal injection drug sodium thiopental, the only FDA-approved U.S. manufacturer announced today that it will no longer produce the drug since it could not prevent its use in executions.

Hospira has repeatedly warned its customers that the drug is only indicated for use as an anesthetic and is not intended to take human lives, but that’s never convinced the 34 death penalty states who use the drug for executions. Having figured out that their stern warnings were going unheeded, Hospira has officially decided to take its ball and go home: no more lethal injection drugs for anyone.

The decision comes in response to hundreds of Change.org users and other human rights activists around the world lobbying the pharmaceutical firm to stop supplying executions. For years, Hospira has been the only source of sodium thiopental, a key drug in almost every state’s death penalty procedure. Early in 2010, supply problems led Hospira to temporarily halt production, leaving corrections departments undersupplied and forcing many states to put a hold on executions while they attempted to secure other sources of sodium thiopental.

That sparked a nationwide controversy in which states scoured the globe for drugs to put people to death. According to public records obtained by the ACLU of Northern California, corrections officials there even sent an employee on a “secret mission” in the middle of the night to get some of the drug from Arizona. And without a trace of irony, an employee said “you guys in AZ are lifesavers” once the exchange was over.

America’s secret lethal injection drug dealer has been unmasked for a few weeks now, but that hasn’t stopped states like Arizona and California from going to any lengths necessary to get their hands on more of the drug. They managed to leap another hurdle this week when a major cop out by the FDA allowed illegally imported sodium thiopental to be passed on to the states’ corrections departments, without bothering to actually examine it.

Exercising what they called “enforcement discretion,” FDA officials made clear that they did not examine or test the substance purporting to be sodium thiopental and that they accordingly cannot attest to its “identity, potency, safety, or effectiveness” -- or really anything about it at all. But they handed it off anyway for use on those condemned to die.

The FDA’s decision concerns the last shipment of sodium thiopental that was imported from the United Kingdom just under the wire, before Business Secretary Vince Cable banned the export in accordance with the U.K.’s stance against capital punishment – and due in part to the work of Change.org member in one of our Top 10 Victories of 2010. Just before the ban was imposed, though, California was able to score 500 grams of the drug, enough to kill 85 prisoners.

America’s attitudes about capital punishment are rapidly changing. Whether its poll numbers that show growing support for alternatives to the death penalty, data revealing that 90 percent of U.S. counties don’t use the death penalty at all, or the dwindling number of death sentences nationwide, by most measurements America seems to be moving steadily away from inflicting death as a punishment for crime. Nowhere is that trend more evident than in Texas, where recent figures are showing that prosecutors and juries are less likely than ever to impose capital punishment.

Texas has long held the reputation of America’s roughest and toughest death penalty state, and deservedly so when you consider the 248 people executed in that state over the last decade alone. But recently the Texas Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty released its annual report showing some startling results: only 2 percent of Texas counties imposed a single death sentence in 2010, with the state as a whole issuing just 8 – a 70 percent drop since 2003, and the lowest figure since the death penalty was legalized in 1976.

But it’s not all good news: as The Star-Telegram notes, while death sentences are declining in Texas, the unlikely competitor of California is picking up the slack. California sentenced 21 29 people (pdf) to death in 2010, the same number as in 2009, dwarfing Texas’s 9 death sentences that year. A whopping 13 of the death sentences came from one California county alone, the capital punishment capital, LA County.