吃瓜大本营

In opinion pieces that appeared in papers across California last year, former prosecutors, judges and law enforcement officers raised their voices to declare: enough already, it鈥檚 time to ditch the death penalty. Let鈥檚 consider what they had to say.

Last April, shared her . began her career as a prosecutor and later became a defense attorney. Yet, nothing in her professional life prepared her for the . As a result of what Heron calls a 鈥渓egal technicality,鈥� her brother鈥檚 killer was never convicted. She described the experience this way:

Having served on both sides of the criminal justice system, the experience of losing my brother in this unforgettably tragic way, without recourse or retribution, forced me to re-examine the way "execution" and "closure" are joined in contrived alliance, recited by death penalty advocates to justify their point of view. But having survived my brother's murder without the "benefit" of the death penalty, it is clear to me that the death penalty cannot do what its proponents claim.

Former prosecutor Darryl Stallworth came to the same conclusion but through a different path: by asking a jury to sentence a man to death for . In July, appeared in the San Jose Mercury News. Stallworth spent 15 years as a prosecutor in Alameda County and considered it a promotion when he was asked to handle a death penalty case. But things changed as he actually worked on the case and learned about the horrific childhood of the defendant who began his life in the maternity ward of a prison. In Stallworth鈥檚 words:

What crystallized for me during the trial was something I had slowly been realizing over my career as a prosecutor: I was witnessing a cycle of violence. . .

I realized I could no longer argue for the death of another human being no matter what atrocious things he or she may have done. I now understand that the death penalty is an ineffective, cruel and simplistic response to the complex problem of violent crime.

Decades of experience with California鈥檚 death penalty also showed the 鈥渉anging judge of Orange County鈥� that the death penalty is cruel--to the . In July, Judge Donald McCartin joined activist and actor in an op-ed that appeared in the LA Daily News, calling for legislators to 鈥渂ring an end to the wasteful, hypocritical, demeaning exercise of capital punishment, and replace it with the safer, cheaper, fairer sentence of permanent imprisonment.鈥�

Don McCartin, having sentenced nine men to death and then watched as the system examined, re-examined and finally overturned all of his convictions while executing none of them, now believes the death penalty is a hideously expensive fraud. It tortures the loved ones of murder victims by dragging them through the years of complex appeals required by the U.S. Supreme Court in an attempt to protect the innocent.

For Jeanne Woodford, the former warden of San Quentin and former , it wasn鈥檛 the years of delays in death penalty cases but the experience of actually carrying out executions that shaped her perspective. In October, the L.A. Times published

As the warden of San Quentin, I presided over four executions. After each one, someone on the staff would ask, "Is the world safer because of what we did tonight?" We knew the answer: No.

Woodford said that the execution of Robert Massie 鈥渟tands out among the executions I presided over as the strongest example of how empty and futile the act of execution is.鈥� As Woodford noted, Massie is in many ways a 鈥減oster child鈥� for the death penalty, having committed a second murder after being paroled from prison. She described the night of the execution and concluded:

I did my job, but I don't believe it was the right thing to have done鈥�. Massie needed to be kept away from society, but we did not need to kill him.

Why should we pay to keep him locked up for life? I hear that question constantly. Few people know the answer: It's cheaper -- much, much cheaper than execution.

For of Newark, California, it was both the outrageously high costs and the risk that we will execute an innocent person that persuaded him to change his mind on the death penalty after 33 years as a law enforcement officer in California. In December, in the Contra Costa Times, Oakland Tribune and :

I used to support the death penalty, but my experience in law enforcement has showed me that California would be better off if we replaced the death penalty with permanent imprisonment...Despite the best intentions of law enforcement, prosecutors, defense attorneys, judges and jurors, innocent people have been convicted and sentenced to death. The margin for error with the death penalty is too great. Once imposed, it is a bell that cannot be unrung...

Chief Samuels, like so many other prosecutors, correctional officer and judges, also believes that on the death penalty could be better spent making our communities safer:

If the millions of dollars currently spent on the death penalty were spent on , modernizing crime labs and expanding effective violence prevention programs, our communities would be much safer.

Together, these five individuals have more than 100 years of experience working to promote public safety, as prosecutors, law enforcement officers and a judge. Their professional and personal experiences are varied, their reasons are different, but their conclusion the same: it鈥檚 time for California to replace the death penalty with condemning the worst offenders to , and to invest the into making our communities safe.

Perhaps it is time we listen.