Tag: California death penalty
Posted on Wed Nov 11, 2009 at 05:12:10 PM EST
Tags: California death penalty (all tags)
The LA Times reports that death row inmates in California have better living conditions and more privileges that those doing life in the state's maximum security prisons. Law Prof. Doug Berman of Sentencing Law and Policy provides his take. Mine is somewhat different.
The problem with the LA Times article is that it focuses on why inmates prefer death row, one reason being the better conditions and another being the extraordinary time they will spend there awaiting execution, without reporting on the principal reason for California's excessive delay in carrying out executions. It's not the number of appeals the prisoners get. It's that the inmates are indigent and require appointed counsel, and there aren't enough qualified lawyers willing to take the cases, which means they spend years on death row before even beginning their appeals. [More...]
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