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To analyse. Empty death row in a state that has not abolished the death penalty: this is the challenge launched by the Democratic Governor of Calfornia, Gavin Newsom, on January 31, when he decided to dismantle the prison district of San Quentin, in the bay of San Francisco, where nearly 700 convicts are held awaiting execution.
Unlike many of his colleagues, including Democrats, the governor is fundamentally opposed to the death penalty, calling it a “premeditated murder sponsored by the government”. In March 2019, two months after taking office, he imposed a moratorium on executions. This time, he has given the California prison service two years to shut down the country’s most crowded death row – home to more than a quarter of America’s 2,455 convicts.
The announcement came in an almost innocuous way, via a budget request for $1.5 million to transform death row in San Quentin. A simple measure « administrative », assured a relative of the governor. The closure, however, amounts to making the suspension of the death penalty irreversible, while voters in the state have spoken out on several occasions – the last time in 2016 – against abolition.
No executions since 2006
In California, the death penalty has always been a complicated matter. Exactly fifty years ago, on February 18, 1972, the State Supreme Court was the first court in the country to declare the death penalty unconstitutional because it contravened 8e amendment to the Federal Constitution, which prohibits punishments “cruel and unusual”. The President of the California Supreme Court, Donald Wright, a magistrate appointed by Ronald Reagan, had then estimated that she “degrades and dehumanizes all who participate in it”.
Nine months later, voters reversed the Court’s decision. Since then, the pendulum hasn’t stopped swinging. In 1976, justice again suspended executions; in 1978, voters reinstated them. The “Golden State” may be the most progressive, it is one of the 27 American states in which the death penalty remains in force – even if no execution has been carried out there since 2006, due to the multiplication of challenges to the death penalty. ‘lethal injection.
Paradox: the death penalty is no longer carried out, but prosecutors continue to demand it and popular juries to pronounce it – as they did again against the defendant Jesse Torres, sentenced in December 2020, without any consideration for Mr. Newsom’s moratorium. More than 30 inmates have already spent at least forty years on San Quentin’s death row, a facility that has cost California $4 billion since 1978. The establishment of the lethal injection chamber alone has been billed at $853,000.
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