09 April 2024 :

April 5, 2024 - CALIFORNIA. Santa Clara County District Attorney Jeff Rosen is moving to change the sentences of 15 inmates from death into LWOP.
The move affecting 15 men comes 4 years after DA Rosen stopped using the death penalty, a decision made in the wake of the murder of George Floyd.
The long-serving district attorney said that he had lost faith in capital punishment as a fair and effective crime deterrent. The system, Rosen said, was a fruitless and unfair effort that left victims and perpetrators in legal limbo for decades. Moreover, California has a moratorium on the death penalty.
Rosen said: “The question is not whether these 15 human beings deserve the death penalty. It’s whether the 2 million people of Santa Clara County deserve the indignity and ineffectiveness of the death penalty. It’s an antiquated, racially biased, error-prone system that deters nothing and costs us millions of public dollars and our integrity as a community that cherishes justice.”
The DA’s unprecedented resentencing effort, which began with a filing in Superior Court, is seeking to change the sentences from death to life in prison without parole.
A California law allows district attorneys to resentence a person if they determine the sentences no longer serve justice. The DA said that all of the crimes committed by those sent to death row were horrible –and these violent and dangerous criminals should and will spend the rest of their lives in prison.
DA Rosen said: “Judges and juries of the People should decide where an inmate dies. God should decide when.”

https://countyda.sccgov.org/news/news-release/da-resentences-death-row-inmates-life-without-parole