California Has Largest Death Row Population : Prisons: Last month the state surpassed Texas, which has 367 condemned and has been executing inmates. Florida is a distant third.

With or without convicted murderer David Mason, California is now the state with the largest Death Row population, quietly surpassing longtime leader Texas.

California achieved the milestone last month. Officials responsible for seeing that the state carries out executions said they were unaware that California’s condemned population is now the largest.

California has a condemned population of 369, counting Mason.

For years, Texas had the largest Death Row population but now has 367 condemned inmates, a prison spokesman in Huntsville, Tex., said. Florida is a distant third with 320 condemned inmates. Altogether, the population on the death rows in the 37 states with capital punishment is 2,800.

“What a peculiar statistic,” Dan Schnur, communications director for Gov. Pete Wilson, said of California’s emergence. “It points out an inherent contradiction: Through heightened penalties, we are addressing the spread of violent crime. On the other hand, there’s no question that the process needs to be speeded up.”

Dorothy Erhlich of the ACLU of Northern California, one of the leading death penalty opponents, said: “It is certainly a landmark--not one people should be proud of.”

Erhlich said the growth of the Death Row population shows the system is “not working and other alternatives need to be looked at.”

“People don’t feel safer,” she said. “There is a real climate of fear around crime. The solution that had been offered, the death penalty, has failed the people.”

“Maybe this number will have a sobering effect,” said Richard Dieter of the Death Penalty Information Project in Washington. “I’m not sure California wants to think of itself as being the leading death penalty state.”

This year, 16 murderers have been added to Death Row at San Quentin, compared to 19 who have been sentenced to die in Texas. But through lethal injections, Texas has reduced its population by 11 people in 1993 and was scheduled to execute another man early today.

Texas has carried out 64 executions since 1982, when the death penalty was renewed there. Since California’s capital punishment laws went into effect in 1978, the state has executed one person, Robert Alton Harris, on April 21, 1992.

Unless there is another inmate like Mason, who dropped all appeals, it is unlikely that there will be another execution this year. The state Supreme Court has affirmed 149 death sentences, but the condemned are pressing additional appeals.

At last count, 97 Death Row inmates whose sentences were affirmed in California courts were pressing habeas corpus appeals in federal district courts. Additionally, five others who lost their appeals in federal district courts are pressing their cases in the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, making them closest to exhausting all appeals.

Among the five is William Bonin, convicted in Los Angeles and Orange counties in the so-called Freeway Killings of young men in the late 1970s. The others are Jaturun Siripongs of Orange County, Bernard L. Hamilton of San Diego, Melvin J. Wade of San Bernardino and Keith D. Williams of Merced.

California has nine condemned men who have been on Death Row since the 1970s.

In 1992, 31 executions were carried out nationwide, the highest number since the U.S. Supreme Court affirmed the constitutionality of capital punishment in 1976.

But the number of executions did not slow the increase in condemned prisoners. Nationally, 250 people a year are sentenced to death.

Capital punishment proponents say the only way to increase the number of executions is to limit the appeals process. But they acknowledge that efforts to streamline the system have met with little success.

Abolitionists hold out hope that the pro-death penalty bent of the U.S. Supreme Court will soften and that the court may one day strike down the ultimate penalty. But both the U.S. Supreme Court and California Supreme Court are dominated by justices who consistently uphold death sentences.

Kent Scheidegger, legal director of the conservative Criminal Justice Legal Foundation in Sacramento, called California’s milestone inevitable, given the state’s overall population and crime.

He also called the number “irrelevant; it doesn’t indicate whether we enforce the death penalty.” The only number that reflects this more important question of enforcement is the number of executions, he said.

“California in reality does not have the death penalty,” Scheidegger said. “I don’t consider one execution out of all the murders we have had over the years to be having the death penalty.”