latimes.com/news/local/la-me-deathrow11-2009nov11,0,597884.story
latimes.com
Death penalty is considered a boon by some California inmates
Given the state moratorium on executions and
an appeals process that can last for decades,
inmates can expect to live a long time, and with
privileges other prisoners lack.
By Carol J. Williams
November 11, 2009
White supremacist gang hit man Billy Joe Johnson got what he asked for from the Orange County jury that convicted him of first-degree murder last month: a death sentence.
It wasn't remorse for his crimes or a desire for atonement that drove him to ask for execution; it was the expectation that conditions on death row would be more comfortable than in other maximum-security prisons and that any date with the executioner would be decades away if it came at all.
Although executions are carried out with comparative speed in states such as Virginia, where Beltway sniper John Allen Muhammad was put to death Tuesday night,
capital punishment in California has become so bogged
down by legal challenges as to be a nearly empty threat,
say experts on both sides of the issue.
"This is a dramatic reaffirmation of what we've already
known for some time, that capital punishment in California
takes way too long," Kent Scheidegger, legal director for the l
aw-and-order Criminal Justice Legal Foundation in Sacramento,
said of Johnson's bet that he will live a long life on death row.
"This guy certainly feels like it's worth the risk."
Statistics suggest that Johnson may be correct in his calculations.
California has the nation's largest death row population, with 685 sentenced
to die by lethal injection. Yet only 13 executions have been carried out since
capital punishment resumed in 1977 and none of the condemned have been
put to death since a moratorium was imposed nearly four years ago.
Five times as many death row inmates -- 71 -- have died over that
same period of natural causes, suicide or inside violence.
Though death row inmates at San Quentin State Prison are far from coddled,
they live in single cells that are slightly larger than the two-bunk, maximum-security
confines elsewhere, they have better access to telephones and they have
"contact visits" in plexiglass booths by themselves rather than in communal
halls as in other institutions. They have about the only private accommodations
in the state's 33-prison network, which is crammed with 160,000-plus convicts.
Death row prisoners are served breakfast and dinner in their cells, can
usually mingle with others in the outdoor exercise yards while eating
their sack lunches, and have exclusive control over the television,
CD player or other diversions in their cells.
"Death row inmates probably have the most liberal telephone privileges
of anyone in state custody," said Terry Thornton, spokeswoman for the
California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation, explaining that
they need ready access to their attorneys and can often make calls from
their cells over a phone that can be rolled along the cellblock.
The condemned wear the same jeans and chambray-shirt prison garb,
eat the same food as prepared in other prisons and enjoy the same access
to mail-order and canteen goods paid for by their families, as long as
they maintain good behavior, Thornton said.
Those on death row are also allowed more personal property
inside their cells, to accommodate their voluminous legal documents
without infringing on the 6 cubic feet of snacks and entertainment
devices allowed each prisoner, said Lt. Sam Robinson, spokesman for San Quentin.
"It's not that he thinks conditions will be better; they are better,"
Johnson's attorney, Michael Molfetta, said of his client's request for
death row. Johnson, 46, figures that he will be close to 70 by the time
his appeals are exhausted, Molfetta said, "and he says he doesn't care to live beyond that."
Johnson was convicted last month of first-degree murder with
special circumstances in the March 2002 killing of former gang associate
Scott Miller. Johnson, a "shot caller" in the white supremacist Public Enemy
Number One gang, was found guilty of orchestrating Miller's execution-style
murder for having revealed gang secrets in a television interview.
On Oct. 29, Johnson's jury decided that he should be sentenced to death.
Orange County Superior Court Judge Frank F. Fasel is expected to
impose the execution order when he formally sentences Johnson on Nov. 23.
As an "L-WOPP," a prisoner sentenced to life without the possibility of parole,
Johnson could have been sent to any maximum-security facility in the state,
where other Level IV offenders share an 8-foot-by-10-foot cell, a sink and a
toilet. Gang leaders are often sent to the special housing unit at Pelican Bay
State Prison, where they live in isolation with few of the comforts allowed elsewhere.
It costs the state about $49,000 a year to house each prisoner, according to
corrections department statistics. Thornton said her department has never
put a figure on the cost for "more staff-intensive" death row housing, but a
state commission of experts last year estimated that the additional security
and legal spending for capital inmates costs taxpayers $138,000 per
death row prisoner each year.
Legal analysts say Johnson's request for a death sentence highlights how
delays in executions could undermine any deterrent effect of California's death penalty.
"If you accept the premise that the death penalty is about retribution,
about punishing someone for intolerable acts, you might argue that it is
completely inappropriate to grant someone's request to have a death penalty
imposed because it is more suitable or convenient for him," said Kara Dansky,
executive director of the Criminal Justice Center at Stanford University.
"It does seem to weaken the position of those who say the death penalty
is a justified mode of punishment."
Laurie Levenson, a former prosecutor now teaching criminal law
at Loyola Law School, said Johnson is probably correct in gauging
that he'll be better off on death row.
"We have a perverse system, given that we have a death row but we
don't really have executions," she said. Convicts seeking death sentences
"don't really feel like they are making life-and-death decisions."
Executions have been on hold in California for almost four years,
following a federal judge's orders for review and reform of lethal injection
procedures. Those orders came after concerns were raised that some
of those executed by the three-shot sequence might not have been
rendered unconscious by the first injection. That could expose the
condemned inmate to pain from the final shot that would be
unconstitutionally cruel and unusual punishment, U.S. District Judge
Jeremy Fogel ruled in 2006, when he ordered the state to correct
the alleged deficiencies.
New protocols were proposed earlier this year but are pending
approval by corrections officials still sorting through thousands of
comments and challenges, and are facing at least another year
of procedural hurdles ahead of Fogel's review.
carol.williams@latimes.com
Copyright © 2009, The Los Angeles Times
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