No Hiatus for Death Penalty

An effort to temporarily halt executions in California died in the Legislature on Thursday when majority Democrats grew concerned that the issue could tag the party’s candidates as soft on crime in the fall elections.

The measure, which would have created a moratorium while a special commission studied the fairness of California’s death penalty, had received a good deal of attention during the campaign last year to stop the execution of Stanley Tookie Williams. The co-founder of the Crips gang in Los Angeles died by lethal injection on Dec. 13 for committing four murders.

But supporters of the moratorium, which could have lasted through 2008, said they didn’t have enough votes to get it through the 80-member Assembly. Backers of the death penalty had hammered the idea as unnecessary, insisting that California’s appeals process had spared the state from executing the innocent.

“There was a general consensus there was no reason to put people through a very divisive and emotional vote if we couldn’t get to the 41 votes,” said the sponsor, Assemblyman Paul Koretz (D-West Hollywood).

He said Democrats were concerned about the Republicans’ eagerness to use the issue in elections, as well as a fear that it might become a topic for Democratic Assembly members in primary races in June. Koretz said he hoped to revive the idea later this year if he can round up enough support.

Assemblyman Todd Spitzer (R-Orange) said Democrats were “not going to fall on their swords for an abstract concept” when Koretz had not shown “that there is either injustices or inequities of the carrying out of the death penalty in California.”

Spitzer said the Democrats’ action showed that they were becoming more insecure about their stands on criminal justice issues. Democrats this month have killed GOP proposals for harsher punishments for sex offenders and child pornographers.

Rejecting the death penalty moratorium “is the first sign of any reasonableness on public safety issues they’ve exhibited,” he said.

California has executed 13 people since the death penalty was reinstated in 1978, including Clarence Ray Allen, who was put to death Tuesday. There are 646 others on death row; Michael Angelo Morales, who was convicted of the 1981 rape and murder of a 17-year-old in Lodi, is next with a Feb. 21 execution date. Three others might be scheduled to die in 2006, which would be an unusually high number for the state.

Moratorium proponents had cited six cases in which death penalty convictions had been overturned in California, but none in which a person had been wrongfully executed. Assembly Speaker Fabian Nunez (D-Los Angeles), who has been trying to focus lawmakers on subjects that appeal to middle-class and independent voters, had not been enthusiastic about the measure, several people familiar with the decision said.

“There was strong bipartisan opposition to the bill on policy grounds, and this is simply reflecting where the state is on the issue,” said Nunez’s spokesman, Steve Maviglio. “Good policy makes for good politics.”

Koretz and four other Democrats had pressed for halting executions until after the California Commission on the Fair Administration of Justice finishes its examination of the way people are sentenced to die. The panel, which was created by the state Senate in 2004, is charged with taking a close look at why some people have been wrongfully convicted and making recommendations by the end of 2007.

Ron Cottingham, president of the Peace Officers Research Assn. of California, said the state’s pre-execution review process was so laborious that a moratorium was not necessary.

“California has one of the of the most intensive review processes in the country,” he said.

The bill, AB 1121, passed the Assembly Public Safety Committee last week with a 4-2 vote along party lines. But the Assembly Appropriations Committee declined on Thursday to pass it along to the entire Assembly before the expiration of a deadline for the consideration of legislation introduced last year.

Stefanie Faucher, program director of Death Penalty Focus, a statewide nonprofit advocacy group based in San Francisco, said that although the bill failed, the level of support it received was impressive given that the Legislature has not tackled the death penalty in years.

“We came very close, so I think we’ll likely see this issue pop up very soon,” she said. “California hasn’t had many executions. As we see more executions, we will probably see more close calls and more errors.”