On June 2, I stood on the steps of Los Angeles City Hall, calling on the City Council to back California Gov. Gavin Newsom’s call to commute the death sentences of the 500-plus inmates currently languishing on California’s death row.
I was joined on the steps by City Councilman Hugo Soto-Martinez. He promised to introduce a resolution in the council urging Newsom to commute the inmate’s death sentences.
Before he leaves office, and hopefully long before, he can do what former President Joe Biden did. He can do what other state governors have done. They have commuted en masse the death sentences of inmates on in Biden’s case of the federal prison’s death row inmates. Several governors have commuted the death sentences of inmates in their death rows.
California’s swollen number of death row inmates dwarves second place Florida’s 200-plus death row inmates. Los Angeles County has the dubious distinction of having placed more individuals on death row than any other county in the country.
Newsom has already taken one huge step toward getting California out of the death penalty business. In March 2019, he issued an executive order declaring a moratorium on executions of California’s 700-inmates on death row. A blanket commutation by Newsom would be the next moral and legally correct step.
Let’s take another look at why that is so. The death penalty is riddled with racial and class bias.
Nearly half of the inmates on state and federal death row are Black or Hispanic. They are poor, receive shoddy, perfunctory legal representation and face continued racially biased prosecutors, judges and juries.
That is not new. U.S. attorneys and district attorneys have recommended the death penalty for mostly Blacks and Latinos and attorney generals, with few exceptions, upheld their death penalty recommendations.
There’s more. If the victim were white a Black defendant would be far more likely to get the death penalty.
Former President Barack Obama and his Attorney General Eric Holder imposed a moratorium on federal executions precisely because of the blatant racial bias in death sentences.
But President Donald Trump moved quickly to end that moratorium at the federal level. There was no loud outcry when he did that mostly for the same reasons that the death penalty was reinstated again after years in the scrap heap.
One is explicitly stated: fear of crime. Even though crime figures are way down, the fear of crime isn’t.
This fear is fueled by high-profile shooting rampages, a crime-gorged media that stuffs the public with mega-doses of crime and violence stories, politicians who pander to fears of crime to get votes, and a Supreme Court that still flatly rejects totally eliminating the death penalty.
Biden was a good example of the deep reluctance to dump the death penalty. He supported the death penalty during most of his years in the Senate.
In a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing in 2000, Biden flatly said, “I support the death penalty.” He backed the 1994 Clinton Crime Bill which ramped up the number of offenses federal prosecutors could seek the death penalty for.
To be precise, it created 60 new death penalty offenses under 41 federal capital statutes, Biden wasn’t alone among Democrats in backing the death penalty. Obama and Hillary Clinton also backed it, but with reservations.
The other far more frightening reason why the death penalty is still alive and well is privately whispered: race. The death penalty has always been white America’s ultimate legal weapon against Black men accused of violent acts (mostly against whites).
According to the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, which has meticulously tracked the obscene racial disparity in the death penalty for decades, more than half of all those executed have been African Americans.
When the crime (or accusation) is rape, the death penalty has almost always been exclusively reserved for Blacks.
Of the 453 men executed for rape since 1930, 405 have been Black. Nearly all of them were executed in the South.
Some were arrested and convicted on the flimsiest of evidence, usually no more than the word of a white woman. At the same time, not one white man received the death penalty for raping a Black woman. The victims of all but 44 of the Blacks executed in the South from 1930 through 1984 were white.
The current numbers on death rows show not much has changed over the years. A Black is still 11 times more likely to get the death penalty then a white when the victim is white.
Armed with Biden’s promise to get rid of the federal death penalty almost certainly to counter this legal warp, Democrats introduced the Racial Justice Act in 2021. It would allow death penalty defendants to cite evidence — such as statistics — that the death penalty is racially tinged.
The bill died and with Trump again calling the legal shots, the chances of it being revived are slim to none.
That brings it back to Newsom and the City Council. They can do the right thing while they have the chance. That’s get California out of the death penalty business hopefully for good.
Earl Ofari Hutchinson is an author and political analyst. He is the host of the weekly the Hutchinson Report Facebook Livestream. His latest book is “Conned:Why the MAGA Nation” (Middle Passage Press).
