Natasha Minsker – Death Penalty Policy Director of the ACLU of Northern California
Ms. Minsker began her career at the Alameda County Public Defender’s Office, spending the first year as a research attorney in the Capital Defense Unit and the remaining four years as a Deputy Public Defender, handling all types of misdemeanor, felony and juvenile cases.
In an interview, she described her first day working the public defender’s office.
“The very first day, they took us to watch the penalty phase of a death penalty trial,” Ms. Minsker recalls. “The woman who raised the defendant was on the stand and the defense lawyer was asking her how she would feel if the State of California executed the defendant, someone she considered her son.
“I was shocked,” Ms. Minsker continues. “I could not believe that, in our legal system, twelve random people would be asked to judge whether another human being deserves to continue living. How would they ever be able to make such a decision? I felt very immediately and profoundly that the death penalty was a blight on our legal system and that it had to go.”
The danger with the death penalty is that, when you execute the wrong person, there is no way to correct the error.
“Innocent people are wrongfully convicted every day in this country and innocent people continue to face execution,” Ms. Minsker said.
“Just a few years ago, Texas executed Cameron Todd Willingham even though experts now agree that he was innocent of the crime he was convicted,” she continued. “Millions of people around the world believe Troy Davis was innocent when he was executed by the State of Georgia.”
“California’s death penalty is dead. The signs are clear: Prosecutors are moving toward life imprisonment with no chance of parole over the legal fiction that is California’s death penalty,” said Natasha Minsker, ACLU of California’s Death Penalty Policy Director. “New polls and election results also show that voters favor replacing the death penalty with permanent imprisonment, with a requirement for work and restitution paid to the Victims’ Compensation Fund.”
Despite this bold declaration, California’s death penalty system continues to suck huge amounts of money from a struggling state budget. This is a fact that has led a number of former death penalty advocates to seek a ballot initiative following the failure of SB 490, a bill that would have asked votes to replace the state’s broken death penalty with life in prison with no chance of parole. Ms. Minsker said, “We must replace the death penalty in California and across the country to ensure we never have another Troy Davis or Cameron Todd Willingham.”
Natasha Minsker of the ACLU will join Public Defender Tracie Olson, Linda Starr, the Legal Director of the Northern California Innocence Project, and Maurice Caldwell, an individual who served more than 20 years in prison for a crime he did not commit, on Thursday November 3 at the Woodland Community and Senior Center to discuss wrongful convictions.
—David M. Greenwald reporting
