Prop 34: Yes – My Conservative/Libertarian Case for Abolishing the Death Penalty

A “Yes” vote on Prop 34 abolishes the death penalty in CA and replaces it with life in prison with no possibility of parole. 

Yes on Prop 34 will:

1) Ensure that no innocent person is ever executed by the State of CA

2) Re-sentence current death-row inmates to life without parole and move them out of very expensive incarceration on death row and into the general prison population

3) Save taxpayers $100 million per year in court costs and incarceration costs

4) Re-direct some of those savings into unsolved rape and homicide investigations

We all know that liberals want to abolish the death penalty because they secretly want deranged sociopaths wandering the streets.  But what about conservatives?  Are there reasons why they might want to end the death penalty?  One, of course is money.  Plain and simple, it turns out it is just cheaper for taxpayers to keep someone in prison for life than to kill them.  But the core argument for conservatives, I believe, is this: why would you give the government you distrust --the power-grabbing corrupt bureaucracy that can’t do anything right-- the power of life and death over it’s own citizens?  Talk about government over-reach!

Since the death penalty was re-instated in California 1978, 14 people have been executed and 83 have died in prison before they could be executed.  Currently there are 725 prisoners on death row.  The last execution was in 2006. So clearly we are not executing very many prisoners in California.  Prisoners sit on death row for decades due to an extensive appeals process and a cash-strapped, back-logged court system.  In spite of all these appeals, innocent people are still occasionally executed in the U.S. though perhaps not in California so far. Case-in-point is Cameron Todd Willingham who was executed in Texas for killing his three children in a fire which everyone now agrees was not arson but rather an accident caused by a space heater. 

Keeping all these prisoners that we will probably never get around to executing on death row and processing all these appeals is really expensive - $100 million per year according to the impartial Legislative Analyst.  Meanwhile police departments around the state are under-funded and just under half of all murders go unsolved leaving the perpetrators at large.

Prop 34 meets my criteria for reasonable use of the initiative process because for politicians, voting against any form of punishment, no matter how sensible or fiscally responsible is a sure way to loose the next election in the sound-bite wars.  Some of the people who put the initiative on the ballot in 1978 to bring back the death penalty now want to abolish it because it is too expensive and it is not working.  I am voting to abolish the death penalty because I think it is a waste of taxpayer’s money and because I have always been uncomfortable with giving the government the power to kill people that have already been captured and locked-up.