Scott Peterson, who killed his pregnant wife Laci. Richard Allen Davis, who kidnapped and murdered 12-year-old Polly Klaas. The Grim Sleeper. “The Dating Game” Killer.
These are a few of the more than 700 inmates on death row in California set to get a reprieve, as Gov. Gavin Newsom plans to issue an executive order placing a moratorium on the state’s death penalty on Wednesday.
“Our death penalty system has been — by any measure — a failure,” Newsom plans to say as he signs the order. “It has discriminated against defendants who are mentally ill, black and brown, or cannot afford expensive legal representation. It has provided no public safety benefit or value as a deterrent. It has wasted billions of taxpayer dollars. But most of all, the death penalty is absolute, irreversible and irreparable in the event of human error.”
The moratorium will last as long as Newsom is in office, though future governors could reverse the measure.
“The intentional killing of another person is wrong, and as governor, I will not oversee the execution of any individual,” Newsom will say Wednesday.
The order will affect the 737 inmates on death row in California, though it will not alter their sentences or allow them to be released, and will close the execution chamber at San Quentin State Prison. About 25 inmates have exhausted their appeals.
[Related: Washington becomes 20th state to get rid of death penalty]
Those inmates include Rodney Alcala, who appeared on, and won, TV show “The Dating Game” in 1978 in the middle of a killing spree that claimed the lives of five people in California and two in New York. Alcala was sentenced to death in California twice and had the sentence overturned, before being sentenced a third time in 2010.
Another death row inmate is Lonnie David Franklin Jr., called the Grim Sleeper because he is believed to have taken a 14-year break between sprees. He was convicted of killing nine women and one girl and sentenced to death in 2016.
That same year, Newsom supported a ballot measure that would have repealed the death penalty. But California voters instead approved an initiative that would have instead expedited appeals for those on death row, effectively speeding up the process.
The then-lieutenant governor said he would support the will of the voters, telling the Modesto Bee during his gubernatorial campaign, “I would not get my personal opinions in the way of the public’s right to make a determination of where they want to take us.”
California has had its share of high-profile inmates, but some of the most famous who have faced capital punishment in the state have died in prison instead. Cult leader Charles Manson, convicted of first-degree murder in the deaths of seven people who were killed by his followers in the Tate-LaBianca murders, dodged the death penalty in 1972 after the Supreme Court declared the punishment unconstitutional. He died in prison in 2017.
“Night Stalker” Richard Ramirez, a Satanist who was convicted of 13 murders and sentenced to death in 1989, died of cancer in 2013. He had not exhausted his appeals and was still on death row.
