04 February 2025 :
January 31, 2025
CALIFORNIA - California saw the nation’s biggest drop in death row inmates. Without any executions
California’s death row population decreased by 63 in 2024 — without any executions, according to a new report. That means the state saw the largest death row population decline of any U.S. death penalty jurisdiction, even as some states continue executing inmates.
The number of condemned California prisoners went down to 591, the 1st time it has been below 600 since 2001, the nonprofit Death Penalty Project said in a report released this week. 13 of the inmates died in prison, and most of the rest were resentenced to prison terms under changes in state law. One was exonerated.
President Donald Trump ordered a flurry of executions in the final months of his 1st term as president, and he wants capital punishment expanded in his 2nd term. But the report details a significant drop in the death-penalty population nationwide.
At the start of this year, there were 2,092 prisoners under death sentences in the U.S., 149 fewer than a year earlier, and the 1st time since 1988 that the nation has had fewer than 2,100 death row inmates, according to the report.
In the past 6 years, juries in California have sentenced 20 convicted murderers to death, an average of 3.3 per year, the report said. From 1995 through 2000, there were 223 death sentences in the state, or 37.3 per year.
And while polls indicate a narrow majority of Americans — 53%, according to a Gallup survey in October — still favor the death penalty, the polls also show opposition among adults 43 and younger.
“With public support for the death penalty at a 50-year low and the youngest generation of Americans even less supportive of the practice, I suggest that these practices will cause even more people to conclude that governments cannot be trusted to fairly carry out capital punishment,” Robert Dunham, director of the Death Penalty Project and author of the report, told the Chronicle.
[…] California juries issued 3 death sentences last year, all by unanimous juries as state law requires. But the state has not executed anyone since 2006, when a federal judge found that its lethal injection procedures were defective and created an undue risk of anesthetic failure and an agonizing death.
Gov. Gavin Newsom, an avowed opponent of capital punishment, declared a moratorium on executions after taking office in 2019, an action that has been endorsed by the leading Democratic candidates to succeed him in 2026. The state’s voters, however, narrowly rejected ballot measures in 2012 and 2016 to repeal the death penalty and resentence condemned prisoners to life without parole.
Pennsylvania also has a moratorium on executions, and 23 states have abolished the death penalty.
Worldwide, the United States is in the minority on the issue: Among 193 countries in the United Nations, only 53 enforce death penalty laws. In Europe, Belarus is the only nation with such a law; France and Germany repealed their laws in 1981, Italy in 1994 and Great Britain in 1998.
https://www.sfchronicle.com/politics/article/california-death-penalty-report-20068690.php
