Death Penalty Facts

In the March 6 article, “Death Row Often Means a Long Life,” you mention two attorneys, Michael J. Brennan and Philip A. Trevino, who take on capital cases and have been compensated $250,000 for representation of two death row inmates. I believe that by taking on these clients, they may have brought their clients closer to execution. Because, as your article states, their appeal to the state Supreme Court is mandatory, it would follow that they must have counsel. If they do not have counsel, then there can be no mandatory appeal and hence no execution.

Conversely, if an attorney (like myself) who opposes the death penalty simply refuses to take on these and other such clients, the entire machinery of death would come to a complete halt here in California.

Jeffrey L. Hoffer

Westlake Village

Though I agree that all doubt must be removed (and this must start with an investigation by competent law enforcement personnel) before a person is convicted and given the death sentence, your article made it clear that there are those who would delay executions in hope that the death penalty will eventually be abolished.

Another group of people that you seem to so conveniently fail to mention is the family members of the victims. Never again will these people hear the voice or feel the touch of the loved one whose life was snuffed out by these inmates you seem to feel so sorry for. But I guess to concentrate on them as much as on ‘the death row person is not the politically correct thing to do.

Frank Dayton

Hesperia

It’s time to bury the myth that death row inmates and their lawyers are overmatched by the vast resources of prosecutors. To recap, California Atty. Gen. Bill Lockyer spends $11 million annually to enforce the death penalty, while defense lawyers receive $47.8 million from taxpayers to oppose it: Defense lawyers get in excess of four times more money than prosecutors. No wonder it takes so long.

This death penalty fact -- that prosecutors are seriously underfunded -- bears repeating because an earlier editorial (“Less Fodder for Death Row,” March 2) discussed the death penalty’s “obvious inequities” and described death row as “a dumping ground” for the “poorest defendants with the lousiest lawyers.”

Well, if the poor inmates and their lawyers can’t get by on $47.8 million, what can we realistically expect from prosecutors and their paltry $11 million? And that’s before the cuts that Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger has promised to make in prosecutors’ salaries and pensions.

By repeating the canard that California defense lawyers are underfunded and undertrained, the March 2 editorial helped perpetuate the climate in which delay, and death from old age, is victory. Let’s not give up on capital punishment without at least giving prosecutors more than 23% of the funding we provide the inmates.

Matthew Mulford

San Diego

While the March 6 article accurately described the financial cost of pursuing the death penalty in California, it inaccurately portrayed the training of death penalty defense lawyers.

For more than 20 years, through our annual seminar, the state’s criminal defense organizations have worked to improve the effectiveness of capital defense counsel. Because of their extraordinary complexity and the immense stakes involved, the death penalty seminar teaches that these cases require careful preparation, comprehensive knowledge of the subject matter and meticulous care in the performance of defense lawyers’ professional responsibilities.

The U.S. and California supreme courts have increasingly emphasized the right to effective counsel in capital cases. Nationwide, more death penalty judgments are reversed because of constitutionally inadequate lawyering than for any other reason. As long as California imposes the death penalty, our organizations have a duty to train lawyers to advocate skillfully and vigorously on behalf of our clients.

Paulino Duran

President, California

Public Defenders Assn.,

Sacramento