The death penalty system in California is so backed up that the state would have to execute five prisoners a month for the next 10 years just to clear the prisoners already on death row.
The average wait for execution in the state is 17.2 years, twice the national figure. And the backlog is likely to grow, considering the trend: Thirty people have been on death row for more than 25 years, 119 for more than 20 years and 408 for more than a decade.
These statistics were cited by an influential judge in a recent article, one in a small but growing number of critiques of California's death penalty machinery, which has proved to be so clogged that one jurist has called capital punishment in the state an illusion.
Arthur L. Alarcon, a veteran judge on the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals in Los Angeles, supports capital punishment and has voted in favor of death sentences more often than he has voted against them. His article in the Southern California Law Review is drawing considerable attention, not least because, unlike many critics, he does not blame delays on defense lawyers or liberal judges.
Rather, he has called for a radical overhaul of what he described as systemic problems, including a critical shortage of defense lawyers to represent death row inmates on appeal and an inefficient use of judicial resources.
Alarcon suggested a major infusion of cash to attract lawyers to the difficult cases. He also proposed shifting automatic judicial review of death penalty cases to the state's appeals courts.
Taking sole jurisdiction from the California Supreme Court, which has had exclusive oversight since California became a state in 1850, would require a constitutional amendment, a tall order. Alarcon, however, said the alternative could be dire.
"The delays in reviewing capital cases will continue to grow in California to the point where the United States Supreme Court may someday hold that such imprisonment is, in and of itself, cruel and unusual punishment," he argued.
Alarcon, 81, has a long history with the death penalty. A former prosecutor who tried death penalty cases, he served as the clemency secretary to Gov. Pat Brown when Brown was considering requests to commute death sentences. More recently, he cast a key vote paving the way for the 1992 execution of Robert Alton Harris, the first inmate put to death by the state in 25 years.
