California currently has 592 people in our prisons who have been sentenced to death.
It is the largest population of prisoners awaiting the execution of any state. An astonishing 175 of these detainees were sentenced to courts of the County of Los Angeles, giving the dubious distinction to hold more men (and three women) in the corridor of death than any state except Florida. In fact, there are currently more people waiting for execution than throughout Texas.
It is therefore fair to say that Los Angeles still plays a big role in discussions on the death penalty at the national level, at a time when our president pursues it, even if the intrinsic racism and the injustice of the ultimate sentence are increasingly recognized by the prosecutors who use it.
This apparently includes the county of the. Atty. Nathan Hochman, who wrote not long ago that he was “well aware of the troubled history of the death penalty, of those who were then justified and philosophical questions concerning his implementation.”
This makes all the more disturbing that Hochman recently announced that he would overthrow the policy of his predecessor, George Gascón, and would once again consider pursuing the death penalty in certain types of “extremely rare” murder (the death penalty can only be requested in murders with special circumstances, such as the murder of a police officer).
The return to death is “a terrible idea”, Michael Romano, professor of law of Stanford and president of the California committee on the revision of the penal code, told me, and I could not agree more.
“It’s racist,” said Romano. “And all the problems of the death penalty are exacerbated in Los Angeles.”
If Hochman’s decision is a mistake, it is based on politics and pride – an erroneous belief that it can evoke a recipe that deactivates the abuse of the cake.
He “reflects a kind of arrogance on the reliability of our system,” said Bryan Stevenson. He is a lawyer for civil rights who pleaded deaths of death at the Supreme Court and executive director of the Equal Justice initiative, an organization of human rights in Montgomery, Ala.
“There has been a lot of progress in Los Angeles to confront prejudice against the poor, prejudice against people of color,” said Stevenson. But “these problems have not been resolved in the way you can impose the perfect type of process that the death penalty requires.”
It is not a gradual intake of the left end. Nationally, it is estimated that 1 in 25 people sentenced to death is innocent, and more and more states, more recently, Virginia, New Hampshire and Colorado, prohibit the death penalty.
The problems recognized with its fairness were part of the reason why Governor Gavin Newsom in 2019 published an executive moratorium on the executions in California, stressing that “death penalties are unequally and unjustly applied to people of color, mental disabled and people who cannot afford costly legal representation”.
In the County of Los Angeles from 2012 to 2019, none of the 22 people sentenced to death was white, according to a report on the death penalty in 2021 by the Romano committee.
Overall, almost 50% of the people who sent them are black, according to the report, almost 30% are Latinos – and less than 15% are white. Systemic biases that lead to these asymmetrical statistics are difficult to identify and often slip subtly at each stage of the legal process. For example, when the murder victim is white, studies show that prosecutors are more likely to ask for the death penalty than for a color victim.
I spoke with Hochman of his reasons to restore the death penalty in the mixture, and he said that part of his decision was to end the type of “general ban” that Gascón had implemented when Gascón refused to ask for the death penalty – never.
Los Angeles County Dist. Atty. Nathan Hochman will allow prosecutors to continue the death penalty in rare circumstances.
(Damian Dovarganes / Associated Press)
It is politics. Hochman campaigned to bring back the capital punishment as part of a difficult crime platform, and he delivers. He argues that even if the death penalty remains legal in California – with state voters who have not put it on several occasions – it is its responsibility to use it, although carefully.
“When I took an oath of the district prosecutor, and he said that I was going to defend all the laws of the state of California, I have not seen any asterisk on this oath, and I am not allowed to cross my fingers and to say that I will only support the laws that I personally want to promulgate or do,” he said.
However, this is a bit falsified. Prosecutors use their discretion all the time and should in fact use this broad latitude in decision -making to ensure that they do not simply act in law, but in the interest of justice.
This discretionary power to continue what is right on what is simply legal is “what led prosecutors through our state and the country to create units of integrity of condemnation which examine old cases; to put pressure to modify the laws on the way young people are questioned and condemned; To question the police shots and to carry out independent investigations, ”said Romano.
“If the prosecutors limited themselves to following the laws instead of directing justice, this short-circular both public security and the fairness we are looking for in our criminal justice system,” he said.
And consider this: in 2016, proposal 62, which sought to repeal the death penalty, failed, as Hochman points out – but not in the County of Los Angeles. Here, 52% of voters were in favor of replacing it with life for life without the possibility of parole. These were similar to the results in 2012, when proposal 34, which also sought to end the death penalty, was approved by 54% of Los Angeles voters.
The death penalty is therefore not really a winner with Angelenos. I suppose that few people would be indignant if Hochman made an exception to his general ban on general prohibitions and left the death penalty in the trash, the campaign promises.
Hochman said, rather, that he planned to make death sentence decisions both faster and with a multilayer process that would not only imply prosecutors, but also allowed defense liters to plead attenuating factors.
He used two examples of the types of cases where he would consider it, the two mass shots – the shooting in 2012 of 26 people, including 20 children, in Sandy Hook, in Connecticut, and the mass shooting of 2017 on the Las Vegas band in which a shooter killed 60 people and injured more than 400.
Although these two crimes are terrible and certainly deserve severe sanctions, they also highlight the subjectivity of the “extremely rare” standard that he uses.
What about serial killers? What about a school shooting where deaths are a figure? What about a parent whose child is murdered, the worst imaginable loss for them, like the recent and tragic murder of Oscar Omar Hernandez, 13, allegedly by a football coach who is now accused by Hochman of a special murder eligible for the penalty of death?
Elisabeth Semel, law professor at UC Berkeley and founding director of Berkeley Law Death Penalty Clinic, said he was “elusive and slippery” to determine what the most flagrant, worthy of death. “It gives real huge latitude for arbitrariness,” she said. “And one of the worst failures of the death penalty is his arbitrariness.”
Hochman said he was not worried about racial prejudices in cases of death sentence today, because “there are the many protections that have been put in place to deal with this particular problem, around 2025 in the County of Los Angeles”.
He underlines the law on racial justice 2020, which gives defense lawyers the ability to question the racial prejudices perceived in real time, as key protection. He adds that “the sensitivities that prosecutors have themselves developed over the years to implicit and explicit racial prejudices, the sensitivity that the courts have also developed to these questions and the very talented defense bar which exists in the county of Los Angeles which will find all the types of racial prejudices” also protects the defendants.
It is a much more controversial assertion than Hochman does, and more than one state district prosecutor argues the opposite.
Last year, after a visit to inherited sites, a museum and a memorial in Montgomery led by Stevenson concentrated on the intertwined stories of criminal justice and slavery, the county of Santa Clara Dist. Atty. Jeff Rosen took an unprecedented step. He asked the court to resist each conviction for the death penalty ever won in the County of Santa Clara without parole.
“It does not mean that I think that things are as bad today as they were 50 years ago,” said Rosen at the time. “But I am also convinced that as a society, we could ensure the fundamental equity of the legal process for all people. With each exemption, with each story of racial injustice, it becomes clear to me that it is not the world in which we live.”
The Supreme Court of the State also weighs unexpectedly. Last year, he agreed to move forward on a case brought by the office of the public defender of the State, who manages the calls for the death penalty, accusing that the racial bias inherent in the death penalty makes him illegal under the Californian Constitution.
Although the costume names California Atty. General Rob Bonta as a defendant, Bonta also spoke of problems with the death penalty and his office encouraged the court to examine the case. The case evolves slowly, but could potentially end the death penalty in California.
In the meantime, Hochman retains the right to try to enforce the law of the state as he seems.
But at a perilous moment in history where black and brown Americans are attacked, when the ideals of diversity, equity and inclusion have been targeted for eradication, when the history of slavery and civil rights is literally erased, our district lawyer has chosen a path that asks us to believe that a legal system that has historically discriminated direction.
This leaves Los Angeles a death penalty policy that throws evidence, and justice, in favor of pride.
California Daily Newspapers
