“The death penalty is not a deterrent to crime, nor is it swift justice,” former San Quentin Warden Jeanne Woodford told an audience of about 100 attorneys and death penalty opponents in a recent Marin County speech.
It is costly, ineffective and fails to make the public safe, said Woodford, who is now the executive director of Death Penalty Focus, a San Francisco based organization that is gathering signatures for a state ballot initiative that would eliminate the death penalty and replace it with life without the possibility of parole. The petition needs 400,000 signatures to qualify for the November 2012 ballot. As of Dec. 6, it had 212,000.
In addition to establishing the life without parole as the maximum penalty, the ballot initiative would establish the Safe California Act, which would require murderers to work to pay restitution and set aside $100 million to help solve murder and rape cases. Approximately 56 percent of rape cases and 46 percent of murders go unsolved.
The organization has the support of the National Black Correctional Officers Association.
When she arrived at San Quentin in 1978, two weeks after graduating from Sonoma State University, she was one of the first women to work in a prison housing unit. Woodford spent 26 years at San Quentin, including four years as warden.
“I killed four people for the State of California. It didn’t make anything better for anyone. On the day of an execution,” she said in her Dec. 6 talk, “you get up in the morning knowing you are going to kill a person.”
She would ask herself if the world would be any safer and answered “no.”
“I would be surprised if any warden who has witnessed an execution is in favor of the death penalty. It doesn’t work, and it is very costly,” she said.
California has spent $4 billion on capital punishment since restoring the death penalty in 1977, she said. During that time, 13 prisoners have been executed, which breaks down to $308 million per execution, she said. The cost is expected to rise to $9 billion by 2030.
It is estimated that sentencing to life without parole instead of parole would save the state more than $184 million a year.
“Executions have an emotional effect on staff who carries them out,” she said.
She stated other statistics: 139 condemned people in the U.S. have been found innocent, and at least three who were executed are believed innocent.
States with the death penalty have the highest crime rates, she noted. For instance, New York, where there is no death penalty, has a crime rate 40 percent lower than California’s.
A new Death Row is likely to be built in Marin, she said.
“When I was warden, Gov. Gray Davis tried to move Death Row. It would have cost $210 million then. The cost today is estimated at $400 million,” Woodford told the audience.
