New California Attorney General and former Congressperson, Xavier Becerra, announced last Wednesday he will continue the death penalty case against Scott Dekraai.
Dekraai plead guilty to murdering eight people at the Seal Beach Meritage Salon in 2011. One of the victims was Dekraai’s ex-wife. They were in the midst of a custody battle over their son.
District Attorney Tony Rackauckas had sought the death penalty and wanted to use the testimony of a jail informant for the purpose.
However, the Public Defender’s office discovered Rackauckas and the office of the Sheriff, Sandra Hutchens, had operated a clandestine informant program at the County Jail.
An Orange County judge, following repeated frustrated attempts to get documents about the program from the DA, ordered the Attorney General’s office to take over the death penalty phase of Dekraai’s prosecution.
In the meantime, investigations into the clandestine informant program were initiated by the OC Grand Jury, the Attorney General’s office and the U.S. Department of Justice. Hundreds of prior prosecutions using jailhouse informants might be tainted by unconstitutional testimony.
California has the largest number of inmates on “death row,” with approximately 750 convicted defendants awaiting execution. This is almost one quarter of the U.S. total.
California has not executed anyone since 2006. A sizeable portion of the California electorate, 46.4 percent, voted last November to repeal the death penalty.
There are many issues posed by the death penalty today. First, there is the moral issue of the government deliberately killing a person. There is no further appeal once the death penalty has been executed, and several erroneous murder convictions have been uncovered.
Furthermore, there is no evidence that the murder rate in a state is impacted by the existence of the death penalty in that state.
The imposition of the death penalty has been repeatedly challenged as discriminatory against people of color and poor people in general.
Methods of death penalty executions have also been challenged as cruel and unusual punishment. The most common method today, lethal injection, is still under attack as unreliable.
The extended time for legal appeals of death sentences is another major problem. The average time for a death penalty case is now approaching 20 years.
Aside from the cost to the public in legal fees, the length of death penalty cases continually aggravates the ongoing emotional pain of the survivors of the victims.
This failure to achieve some kind of closure to the legal proceedings involved in a murder is the greatest weakness of the death penalty punishment.
In the last election, a slight majority of Californians voted on a ballot proposition to curtail some of the lengthy death penalty appeal procedures.
That ballot proposition itself has been challenged as unconstitutional and the case is still pending in the California Supreme Court.
–Joel Block is a retired attorney living in Rossmoor.
This article appeared in the April 5, 2017 print edition of the News Enterprise.
