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There are currently 592 people in California who have been sentenced to death.
It is the largest population of prisoners awaiting executions in any state. Of these inmates, 175 were sentenced by Los Angeles County Courthouse, giving the suspicious distinction that more men (and three women) would hold death row inmates (and three women) than in any state except Florida. In fact, there are more people waiting to run now than everything in Texas.
So it’s fair to say that Los Angeles plays a major role in the death penalty debate across the country when our president is pushing for more use, even by the prosecutors who use it, despite the increasingly acknowledged unfairness of the ultimate sentence.
It appears to include La County Dist. Atty. Nathan Hochman wrote that he “knows well the history of the problematic death penalty, those who were later proven, and philosophical issues of its implementation.”
This has recently announced that Hochman will reverse the policy of his predecessor, George Gascón, and once again consider pursuing the death penalty in certain “very rare” types of murders (the death penalty may only be sought for murders in special circumstances, such as the murder of a police officer).
Michael Romano, a Stanford law professor and chairman of the California Committee on Criminal Law Revision, returns to death sentences are “a terrible idea.”
“It’s racist,” Romano said. “And all the issues surrounding the death penalty are getting worse in Los Angeles.”
If Hochman’s decision is wrong, it is rooted in politics and hub arrogance. This is a false belief that it can be reminiscent of recipes that will help you to relieve abuse from cakes.
It “reflects a certain arrogance about the reliability of our system,” Brian Stephenson told me. He is a civil rights lawyer who argued for the death penalty case before the Supreme Court and is the executive director of the Equal Justice Initiative, a human rights group in Montgomery, Alabama.
“In LA, there have been a lot of progress in confronting bias against poor people, bias against people of color,” Stevenson said. But “these issues have not been resolved in a way that allows for the complete process that the death penalty requires.”
This is not a progressive take on the left. Nationally, one in 25 people sentenced to death is innocent, with more and more states recently banning death penalties in Virginia, New Hampshire and Colorado.
The recognized issue of fairness is part of the reason Gov. Gavin Newsom issued an execution moratorium on executions in California in 2019, pointing out that “death penalty is applied unevenly and unfairly and applies unfairly to people with mental disabilities and those who cannot obtain expensive legal representation.”
According to the 2021 Death Penalty Report by the Romano Commission, the 22 death penalties sentenced in Los Angeles County from 2012 to 2019 were not white.
Overall, almost 50% of those LA sent to death row inmates are black. Reports show that almost 30% are Latinos, with less than 15% being white. The systematic biases leading to those distorted statistics are difficult to fix and often creep up subtly at every stage of legal process. For example, if the murder victim is white, investigations show that prosecutors are more likely to seek the death penalty than victims of color.
I spoke with Hochman about why the death penalty was going to be brought back to the mix, but said that some of his decisions were to end the kind of “blanket ban” that Gascón implemented when he refused to seek the death penalty.
Atty, Los Angeles County. Nathan Hochman allows prosecutors to pursue the death penalty in rare circumstances.
(Damian Dovarganes/Applications)
That’s politics. Hochman has campaigned to regain the death penalty as part of a tough platform for crime, and he has been streaming. He argues that the death penalty is legal in California, but state voters have repeatedly failed to end it, but it is his responsibility to use it carefully.
“When I took the district attorney’s oath and said I was going to support all the laws in California, I didn’t see an asterisk on that oath. I’m not allowed to go over my finger and say I’m just supporting the laws I personally want to enact or work,” he said.
But that’s a bit dishonest. Prosecutors are always using their own discretion and are in fact expected to use their wide latitudes in decision-making to not only act within the law, but also to use them for the benefit of justice.
The discretion to pursue the right thing about what is simply legal has come to “lead prosecutors across our state and nations, creating conviction integrity units that look into old cases, lobbying to change the laws regarding the way youth were interrogated and declared, questioning police shootings and conducting independent investigations,” Romano noted.
“If prosecutors limit themselves to the following laws rather than leading justice, they would shorten both public safety and the fairness they seek in the criminal justice system,” he said.
Take this into consideration. Proposal 62, which attempted to abolish the death penalty in 2016, failed as Hochman points out, but not in Los Angeles County. Here, 52% of voters were in favor of replacing them with prison life. These were similar to the results in 2012, when Prop. 34, which attempted to end the death penalty, was approved by 54% of Los Angeles voters.
Therefore, the death penalty is not an winner for Angelenos. My guess is that if Hochman puts the exception of blanket bans and leaves the death penalty in the trash bins, I promise, aside from the campaign.
Hochman said instead he plans to determine death penalty sentences more quickly, both in a multi-tiered process that allows prosecutors as well as defense litigants to assert mitigation factors.
He used two examples of the kind of cases that take that into account, both in the 26 shootings in 2012, including 20 children in Sandy Hook, Connecticut, and the 2017 mass shootings on the Las Vegas Strip, in which gunmen killed 60 people and injured more than 400 people.
Both of these crimes are terrible and certainly deserve harsh punishment, but they also highlight the subjectivity of the “very rare” standard he uses.
How about a serial killer? What about school shootings where death is single digits? What about parents whose children are murdered, what about the worst losses they can imagine, like the recent tragic murder of 13-year-old Oscar Omar Hernandez?
Elizabeth Semel, a law professor in Berkeley, California and founder of the Berkeley Law Death Penalty Clinic, said it was “elusive and slippery” to identify what is the most vicious crime worthy of death. “It gives a real extreme to arbitrarity,” she said. “And one of the worst mistakes of the death penalty is its optional.”
Hochman said he is not concerned about the racial bias in today’s death penalty case, as “there are many protections introduced to address that particular issue around 2025 in Los Angeles County.”
He points to the Racial Justice Act of 2020. This gives defense attorneys the ability to challenge perceived racial bias in real time, as a primary protection. He added that “sensitivity that prosecutors have developed over the years for implicit and explicit racial bias, the sensitivity that the courts have developed to those issues as well, and the extremely talented defense bars that exist in Los Angeles County that eliminate all sorts of racial bias.”
It’s a much more controversial argument than Hochman makes a sham, with multiple state district attorneys arguing against it.
After visiting the Legacy Site last year, Stephenson’s Montgomery museums and memorials focused on the intertwined history of criminal justice and slavery. Atty. Jeff Rosen took an unprecedented step. He asked the court to bring all the death penalty convictions he has ever won in Santa Clara County to life without parole.
“I don’t mean I think things are bad today, just like I did 50 years ago,” Rosen told me at the time. “But as a society, I believed that we could ensure the basic equity of the legal process for all. With all exonerations, every story of racial injustice makes it clear that this is not the world we live in.”
The state Supreme Court is also weighing unexpectedly. Last year, they agreed to move forward with a case filed by the state’s Public Defence Bureau. It took charge of the death penalty appeal and accused the racial bias inherent in the death penalty to make it illegal under the California Constitution.
The suit is called California Atty. General Rob Bonta, as a defendant, also spoke about the issue of death penalty, and his office encourages the court to review the case. The case is moving slowly, but could end the California death penalty.
In the meantime, Hochman reserves the right to enforce state laws as he thinks it is appropriate.
But when ideals of diversity, equity and inclusion were targeted for eradication at a dangerous point in history where blacks and brown Americans are under attack, and when slavery and civil rights history are literally erased, our district attorney chose the path to ask us to believe in a judicial system that historically identified the most serious moments of history.
This leaves Los Angeles with a death penalty policy that abandons evidence and justice in favor of hub arrogance.
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