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Reminder: Wednesday’s the day to tell California’s leaders we support the Commission’s recommendation to abolish the death penalty and do everything they can to take people off of death row until it is abolished!

We encourage you to voice your support for the committee’s recent recommendations to abolish the death penalty and reduce the size of death row.

Public comment will be restricted due to time constraints. Depending on the size of the audience, your time to speak could be as short as one minute, and no longer than two-to-three minutes. So keep it short!

Remember that the committee has already recommended the death penalty be abolished; we’re there to support that recommendation. We want committee members to know we appreciate the position they took and that we’ll do whatever we can to support them.

We put together a few talking points that might help you organize your thoughts:

I support the committee’s recommendations to abolish the death penalty and reduce the size of death row because:

One hundred and eighty-five people have been exonerated from death row across the country based on evidence of their innocence. In 2018, Vicente Benavides was exonerated after spending 25 years on California’s death row for a rape and murder he didn’t commit. The Academy of Sciences estimates that more than four percent of US prisoners on death row are innocent. With 703 condemned people on California’s death row, dozens are very likely innocent.
The death penalty is racist. In California, defendants convicted of killing whites were more than three times as likely to be sentenced to death as those convicted of killing blacks and more than four times more likely as those convicted of killing Latinos.
There are people on death row who were under the age of 21 when they were condemned to death. A University of Rochester study found that the rational part of a teen’s brain isn’t fully developed and won’t be until age 25 or so, and the connections between the emotional part of the brain and the decision-making center are still developing until at least that age.
Whether or not you are sentenced to death in California depends on where you live. Studies have shown that five counties in California — Riverside, Orange, Los Angeles, Kern, and San Bernardino — are among the top counties in the US handing down death sentences. This geographical disparity doesn’t meet the US Supreme Court finding that the death penalty is constitutional as long as it is fairly and consistently administered.
There are men and women on death row who didn’t kill anyone and sentenced to death because while they didn’t kill the victim, or even know the victim died, they were involved in the crime.
California has the largest death row in the Western Hemisphere. By implementing any, but preferably all of the seven recommendations the committee suggested, we could drastically reduce that number. Keeping 703 men in cages in an ancient, crumbling prison is inhumane.
There are men and women on California’s death row who are mentally ill. Two prisoners on San Quentin’s death row were recently resentenced because of mental incompetence and there are very likely many more. There are 63 men on death row ranging in age from 60 to 90, and some of those are suffering from age-related cognitive challenges.