June 25 (UPI) — More than 200 civil-rights groups are urging California Gov. Gavin Newsom to use his constitutional powers to commute more than 500 state death sentences.
“California’s death penalty system is not only broken, it is deeply racist and unconstitutional,” Michael Mendoza, national criminal justice director of the New York-based justice advocacy group LatinoJustice PRLDEF, said Wednesday in a statement.
The call arrives as some point to what they call an “overwhelming” amount of evidence of racial bias in how the death penalty is carried out in the state. Numerous civil rights orgs argue the death penalty is unconstitutional under the state Constitution’s Equal Protection guarantees.
On Thursday, scores of advocates and national civil rights leaders will gather at the state’s capitol building in Sacramento to visit Newsom and deliver a signed statement by nearly 200 organizations which implores the two-term Democratic governor to grant universal clemency to all of California’s 574 inmates waiting on death row.
A public rally will start around 10:30 a.m. local time on the west steps of the capitol complex with a press conference to follow lead by leaders of renowned organized state and national groups like Clemency California coalition, the American Civil Liberties Union, National Center for LGBTQ Rights, Disability Rights California, Equal Justice Society, Chinese for Affirmative Action, the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights and several others.
A proposed ballot measure in the 2012 election sought to eliminate California’s death penalty, but it faced a narrow defeat with 53% saying keep and 47% of voters in favor of getting rid of it.
“The death penalty is biased beyond repair, which is why we are a proud petitioner in the lawsuit to end California’s death penalty,” stated Morgan Zamora, prison advocacy manager at the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights in Oakland, urging Newsom to “uphold California’s values of dignity, human rights and equal justice by commuting the sentences of every person sitting on death row.”
Last year, 26 people in the United States were sentenced to death with 25 executions.
Meanwhile, California’s department of corrections holds the nation’s largest death row block, with 574 people, among more than 94,000 prisoners in the state. The state also has one the world’s single biggest death rows in which 69% are people of color and one-third Black.
“The death penalty and entire criminal legal system is overrepresented with disabled people, especially disabled people of color,” said Eric Harris, a spokesperson for Disability Rights California.
California’s high court in 2021 overturned the double murder conviction of Edward Wycoff after it was revealed that a trial judge failed to determine his mental competency.
On Wednesday, Harris said DRC has “strongly” advocated to ensure that people with poor mental health, brain injury or intellectual and developmental issues are not placed on California’s death row, where one-third of its population is diagnosed with a “serious” mental illness and dozens with a known intellectual disadvantage.
“Many of these impacted people are undiagnosed and it is crucial that we ensure that they not be on death row,” added DRC’s Harris.
The state previously released eight men from California’s death row due to a wrongful conviction.
This month, officials in Oklahoma took steps to grant a new murder trial for longtime death row inmate Richard Glossip after a U.S. Supreme Court ruling in February determined his trial had been flawed.
At least 4% of U.S. convicts on death are innocent, according to estimates in a 2014 study by the National Academy of Sciences.
“Now is the time for California to be a beacon of light for the rest of the country by protecting the civil rights and human dignity of the state’s most vulnerable residents,” said Vincent Pan, a spokesman with Chinese for Affirmative Action, a San Francisco-based entity founded in 1969.
In addition, advocates say its critical to acknowledge how the brains of young people don’t fully develop until their mid-twenties.
Nearly half of California’s death row population was convicted under age 26, with two-thirds having sat for more than 20 years, dozens for more than four decades, which has resulted in “literally decades of delays caused by California’s inability to provide lawyers to handle capital appeals.”
But while California lawmakers have previously enacted a number of legal reforms targeting the legality of sentencing young offenders who have diminished intellectual capacity, the new laws excluded death row prisoners and those serving sentences of life with no chance of parole.
“Gov. Newsom has a historic opportunity to reject this legacy of racial injustice by granting universal clemency,” Mendoza of LatinoJustice said Wednesday.
