A ballot measure meant to speed up the review process for prisoners sentenced to death did not qualify for the November election, according to the San Francisco Chronicle.
The proposed initiative would have limited appeals by death row inmates, eased the qualifying standards for death penalty defense lawyers and done away with public hearings on lethal injection procedures.
The initiative, backed by supporters of the death penalty, including former California governors George Deukmejian, Pete Wilson and Gray Davis, had only collected a couple hundred thousand signatures before the campaign was suspended in May of this year. Chris Orrock, spokesman for the ballot measure, told Bob Egelko, a reporter for the Chronicle, that suspending the campaign will allow supporters more time to raise money and gather signatures. They now hope to qualify the measure for the November 2016 ballot. The initiative required 807,615 valid signatures to qualify.
In his interview with Egelko, Orrock stated that the proposed changes would speed up the execution process and save money without taking away fairness and due process.
“We’ll use the next year or so to continue to educate the public about the changes to the criminal justice system that this initiative makes,” he said.
At the same time, supporters of Proposition 34 – the 2012 measure that would have abolished the death penalty in the state – are also planning to get their initiative on the November 2016 ballot. Proposition 34 was supported by former Los Angeles District Attorney Gil Garcetti, San Francisco District Attorney George Gascon and former San Quentin State Prison Warden Jeanne Woodford who was also director of Corrections for the California prisons. Prop. 34 lost, picking up 48 percent of the vote.
In a statement by Garcetti, death penalty opponents called the death penalty “broken beyond repair” and say that the proposed ballot measure to shorten the wait time for executions would only serve to make the system more secretive and expensive.
Egelko reported that the proposed initiative would place a five-year limit on death row appeals in state court, put time limits on state judges to make rulings, eliminate public hearings on execution procedures and allow the state to obtain lethal injection drugs from sources other than licensed pharmacies. Opponents of the measure say this will lead to secret policies and the use of untested drug combinations from secret sources. They point to the drawn-out April 29 execution of a convict in Oklahoma, where the man ultimately died of a heart attack.
California has the nation’s largest number of inmates on death row, with approximately 750 condemned to death. However, the state has executed only 13 inmates since the death penalty was reinstated by ballot initiative in 1978, and none since February 2006 when a federal judge ruled that lethal injection procedures were flawed and could lead to undue suffering for the inmate.
