Browsing through the New York Times, I came upon an article by Adam Nagourney "Seeking an End to an Execution Law They Once Championed", which details the attempts by the two proponents of a death penalty initiative, Proposition 7, which passed by a wide margin in 1978, to overturn it with another initiative in this November's ballot.
These two men are Donald J. Heller, a former prosecutor in New York who had moved to Sacramento by 1978, and Ron Briggs, now a Republican member of the El Dorado County Board of Supervisors, who had become a proponent of the measure because his father had another referendum on the California ballot in 1978. If you didn't see this coming, yes, his father is John Briggs, a state senator with gubernatorial ambitions who had take a page from the Anita Bryant playbook to promote a measure that would have banned gay men and lesbians from teaching in the public schools.
Remorse below the great orange wienerbrot.
The death penalty has apparently worked too well in California. In 1978 as the proposition was passing, there were 300 people on death row, and now there are 725. It has cost $4 billion, and a total of 13 people have been executed, 6 since 2000. As Briggs the younger said,
If there was a state program that was costing $185 million a year and only gave the money to lawyers and criminals, what would you do with it?
As for Heller, he had been enlisted for the project by Briggs the elder because he had learned his craft from the "legendary Manhattan district attorney Frank S. Hogan" (Hogan was incidentally a serious bibliophile and his clients included Edward Doheny of the Teapot Dome scandal and Andrew Mellon, secretary of the treasury for Harding, Coolidge and Hoover). Heller now states that the death penalty system he championed is a colossal waste of money:
The cost of our system of capital punishment is so enormous that any benefit that could be obtained from it — and now I think there’s very little or zero benefit — is so dollar-wasteful that it serves no effective purpose.
Briggs and Heller, along with Jeanne Woodford, a former warden at San Quentin State Prison, and Gil Garcetti, a former Los Angeles district attorney (and technical adviser for the TNT show
The Closer) have submitted over 800,000 signatures in support of this initiative, which would replace Death Row with life in prison without parole. It will be the third time California has voted on this issue, and the selling point this time will be the cost of keeping Death Row open.
Briggs wrote, in an op-ed in the Los Angeles Times in February,
There are few "do-overs" in life, especially in politics. With the death penalty, though, 34 years later I have an opportunity to set things right. The Briggs family has decided to endorse the SAFE California campaign, a fall 2012 ballot initiative that would replace the death penalty with a punishment of life without the possibility of parole. The state has another chance at real justice. We should embrace it.
Not the entire Briggs family, of course. According to the New York Times, Mr. Prop. 6, John Briggs, is planning to vote no. Let's hope he is on the wrong side in Novemebr.
Further reading:
Calitics: Death Penalty Headed to November Ballot (March 2, 2012)
Ron Briggs, "California's death penalty law: It simply does not work," Los Angeles Times, February 12, 2012