Death row report sees failed system

The time from death sentence to execution in California is 20 to 25 years, compared with the national average of 12 years, the commission said. Thirty inmates have been on death row more than 25 years, 119 for more than 20 years and 240 for more than 15, according to the report. The state spends about $138 million a year on the death penalty and has executed 13 people over the last three decades, the commission said.

"The system's failures create cynicism and disrespect for the rule of law . . . weaken any possible deterrent benefits of capital punishment, increase the emotional trauma experienced by murder victims' families and delay the resolution of meritorious capital appeals," the commission concluded.

The commission learned of "no credible evidence" that the state had executed an innocent person but said the risk remained. Fourteen people convicted of murder in California from 1989 through 2003 were later exonerated. Six death row inmates who won new trials were acquitted or had their charges dismissed for lack of evidence.

Among the panel's findings:

* A 1978 voter initiative that expanded the kinds of murders subject to the death penalty dramatically increased the number of death sentences in the state. In the year before passage of the so-called Briggs Initiative, seven people were sentenced to death. By 2000, death sentences were averaging 32 a year. They have since leveled off to about 20 a year.

* California's death row inmates whose sentences or verdicts were later overturned waited an average of 16.75 years for their reprieves.

* Seventy-nine death row inmates have not obtained lawyers to handle their first appeals, which are by law automatic, and 291 inmates lack lawyers to bring constitutional challenges based on facts that the trial courts did not hear. It takes inmates an average of 12 years to obtain a state high court ruling on their first appeals.

* The California Supreme Court has such a backlog that only one appeal from a conviction after 1997 has been resolved.

* California does not meet the federal standard for paying private lawyers to handle death cases, and the state's method of paying these attorneys -- sometimes with flat-fee contracts -- violates American Bar Assn. standards.

Since the death penalty's restoration, 40 death row inmates have died of natural causes, 14 have committed suicide and 98 have left death row because their convictions or sentences were overturned, according to figures by the commission and the state Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation. The state now has 673 inmates on death row.