A series of reports have shown that the number of death sentences in California have been declining, with only ten such sentences handed down in 2011.
A story in the Oakland Tribune tracks the decisions of District Attorney Nancy O’Malley, who has not sought the death penalty in any cases since she took that position back in 2010.
My office sought the death penalty in dozens of cases when I was the Los Angeles County district attorney for eight years, and chief deputy district attorney for four. The cases had horrific and compelling facts; I had no problem seeking death sentences. But though I never was squeamish, I now fully support Proposition 34 to replace the death penalty with life in prison with no possibility of parole. Here’s why.
California’s death penalty is broken beyond repair, hideously expensive, and inevitably carries the risk of executing an innocent person. The hundreds of millions of dollars we throw away on this broken system would be much better spent on solving and preventing crime and investing in our kids’ schools.
By Rachel MyersSnatching a purse off the arm of an elderly woman is one of the nastier offenses I can think of – the kind of thing that might make you shake your head and say to yourself “I hope whoever did that gets what’s coming to him.” And then you think for a second about just what he ought to have coming to him: community service, maybe – or even a night in jail. Stealing from an old lady is pretty mean, after all, and you’d want whoever did it to learn a lesson.
I guess that’s what the state of Texas was thinking when it sentenced Willie James Sauls last week for that very crime. Except in this case, apparently the lesson Texas wants us all to learn is “we don’t believe in rehabilitation” – for the crime of stealing a purse, Sauls was sentenced to 45 years in prison. The prosecutors in the case justified the long sentence by pointing out that Sauls has prior convictions and that he “already had chances to address the issues with his behavior.” And with that, they decided this purse snatcher should be locked in prison until he’s 82.
It has become a noteworthy phenomenon in and of itself. Every time we run a story critical of Yolo County District Attorney Jeff Reisig, a handful of people defend the DA, not on the merits but by attacking the messenger, in this case the Vanguard.
In recent columns we have one reader deploring the Vanguard‘s obsession: “Please get help for your sick obsession about the district attorney,” they write. Another, “This was a nonstory that highlights the Vanguard’s bitter animosity toward the local DA.”
Braving the triple-digit August heat of Woodland, 250 protesters not only listened to an hour of speeches but marched down to the courthouse in a protest that marked the third year anniversary of Ajay Dev’s conviction on dozens of charges of raping his adoptive daughter.
“I’m here today because I know without a doubt, with 100 percent certainty that my brother, Ajay Dev, is innocent,” Sanjay Dev told the crowd on Wednesday evening at Woodland’s Freeman Park.
Last week the Vanguard noted that Jeff Reisig had lifted sections of his death penalty column from DA Jan Scully’s April Sacramento Bee column.
The Vanguard was not the only one complaining, as Deputy Public Defender Richard Van Zandt wrote: “Reisig goes one step further by extensively plagiarizing Sacramento District Attorney Jan Scully.”
For years we have complained that the Daily Democrat has simply taken a press release from the DA’s office and re-printed it verbatim. There is no fact-checking for accuracy. They simply take the word of the DA’s office and print it as fact, usually under the deceptive byline of “Democrat Staff.”
On Wednesday, family and friends of Ajay Dev, who believe he has been wrongly convicted of the rape of his adopted daughter, will mark the third-year anniversary of his sentencing with a protest march and vigil. They have done this for every year, and the event usually attracts a few hundred people.
When District Attorney Jeff Reisig submitted his op-ed in support of the Death Penalty, he probably had no idea the response it would trigger. Oh sure, the Vanguard‘s response was a given. But unlike his string of unanswered press releases, many of which have distorted the facts of the case and even the jury’s verdicts and were reprinted verbatim without response, the op-ed generated considerable response.
First, Yolo County’s Public Defender, then two letters to the editor from citizens, then a brief commentary by Cosmo Garvin in the Sacramento News and Review. This weekend we saw and pointed out commentary from Deputy Public Defender Richard Van Zandt and an editorial from the Woodland Daily Democrat, which does not mention the Reisig piece, but comes out decidedly against the death penalty.
by Richard Van ZandtWhen Yolo County District Attorney Jeff Reisig’s hand-picked judicial candidate, Clinton aka ‘Clint’ Parish, sent out a toxic mailer to Yolo County residents a few weeks before the June primary, it took less than a day for Yolo County Sheriff Ed Prieto to withdraw his endorsement of Parish. The mailer was a blatantly dishonest series of charges against Judge Dan Maguire, whom Parish was challenging.
In contrast to Sheriff Prieto, Mr. Reisig waited until the Bee issued an “anti-endorsement” before withdrawing his own. Reisig was at the top of Parish’s endorsement list, and was one of Parish’s first and biggest financial supporters.
Saw a reference to an article by Karen Boudrie Greig, “Last Call From Death Row,” in the August issue of New Orleans Magazine. In it she recounts the trial of Carlos DeLuna, who would be executed in 1989 for a crime that he did not commit.
Our keynote speaker from last week’s event was Maurice Possley, and his work with the Chicago Tribune was critical toward exposing that wrongful execution.
The Vanguard published an afternoon piece on Wednesday showing that Jeff Reisig had not originally written large segments of his op-ed that was released the previous week in the Woodland Daily Democrat.
While many readers drew inferences from the article, the article itself only reported what we knew at the time. It did not make accusations.
Sunday, on the final day of its three-day executive board meeting held in Anaheim, the California Democratic Party overwhelmingly endorsed Prop 34 — the November ballot initiative that would commute all the state’s death sentences to life imprisonment without possibility of parole (LWOP).
Saturday night, though, a lively five-person panel session organized by the party’s Progressive Caucus paired Prop 34 proponents with prisoner rights advocates to debate whether the Prop 34 remedy might be worse than the ailment.
The Vanguard has learned that Yolo County District Attorney Jeff Reisig lifted huge portions of his op-ed last week from an op-ed entitled “Justice for crime victims demands death penalty,” written by Sacramento County District Attorney Jan Scully with Phyllis Loya, the mother of a Pittsburg police officer whose son was murdered.
While the piece written last week by Mr. Reisig is twice the length, at least six paragraphs are directly lifted and another six are slightly altered from the piece written by Jan Scully.
By Gary Wells, Professor of Psychology, Iowa State UniversityI have been conducting experiments on eyewitness identification since 1975, while I was still a graduate student in psychology at Ohio State University. Along with a fellow student, we designed this simple experiment where we staged a theft repeatedly and had people try and pick the thief out from a lineup. Not only did they make a lot of mistakes, but sometimes they were quite certain that they were right when in fact they were wrong.
Late this week comes the news that the wife of convicted killer Marco Topete was attacked last weekend, slashed in the face with a knife. The couple that attacked her were arrested and now face assault and mayhem charges.
I first heard about this on Thursday, and on Saturday it made the news in Woodland and today it makes the news in Davis.
Last night at the Vanguard annual dinner and awards ceremony, Don Heller, a former prosecutor who helped to draft and write the 1978 Death Penalty Statute, argued that Yolo County District Attorney Jeff Reisig’s op-ed released on Wednesday was so filled with errors and factual misstatements that its obvious intended purpose was to politicize the death penalty issue rather than bring forth honest discussion and debate.
Mr. Reisig, in his op-ed, wrote: “In fact, the only objective study on the issue of costs associated with the death penalty, conducted by the non-partisan Rand Corporation in 2008, does not even support the death penalty opponents’ claims. There is simply no solid evidence that eliminating the death penalty and replacing it with life in prison will save taxpayers money.”
One of the more interesting debates that is emerging is over the issue of stop and frisk as a crime control policy. The policy began in New York by Mayor Michael Bloomberg.
Depite the controversy and complaints from rights groups and minorities, the mayor continues to support it, arguing as he did in June, “that it had helped make New York the safest big city in the country, while acknowledging that the police needed to treat those whom they stopped with greater respect.”
You will have to forgive us for focusing a bit on the death penalty this week. After all, this evening five of the leading spokespeople on the issue will be coming to Woodland for a Vanguard event.
In any event, Yolo County DA Jeff Reisig gave us a month’s worth of material. Mr. Reisig was making the argument that the system works, after all, as he writes, “Each of them received due process through the many checks and balances of the criminal justice system and were justly convicted and sentenced to death.”
By Tracie OlsonI am writing as the Public Defender of Yolo County. Contrary to District Attorney Jeff Reisig’s recent opinion piece, there are numerous, overwhelming reasons to oppose the death penalty, and none involve dishonoring victims.
INNOCENT PEOPLE HAVE BEEN SENTENCED TO DEATH AND EXECUTED.
District Attorney Jeff Reisig laments the “endless delays in the criminal justice system, frivolous appeals, and a mountain of misinformation” caused by the “ACLU and its agents.” However, he conveniently ignores the fact that the National Registry of Exonerations has recorded over 920 exonerations across the United States since 1989, more than 100 of which had been sentenced to death.
On Thursday evening, death penalty opponents from across the state will be coming to Woodland to talk about the current state of California’s Death Penalty. It’s interesting, to say the least, that the DA, who has been quiet on this issue since the jury recommended death in the Topete case and Judge Richardson confirmed it, suddenly has an Op-Ed piece in the Woodland paper this morning with Guadalupe Diaz, the sister of slain Officer Tony Diaz.
The piece includes a passionate defense of the death penalty, an emotional appeal and a pointed attack on the ACLU, one of many organizations that have come together to support a ballot measure this November that would convert the death penalty to life without parole.