"Resources now spent on the death penalty could be used to investigate unsolved homicides, modernize crime labs and expand effective violence prevention programs, especially in at-risk communities," Woodford wrote in her statement to the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation, which she headed as an appointee of Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger.
Longtime death penalty foes have jumped on the savings bandwagon, recognizing an approach more likely to persuade budget-conscious conservatives than traditional arguments that executions are immoral and disproportionately applied to minorities, the poor and the mentally ill.
"Now is really the time to ask: If we are faced with the choice of laying off police and prosecutors and closing crime labs or shutting down the death penalty, is the goal to protect the public? If it is, that should be an easy decision to make," said Natasha Minsker, head of death penalty policy for the American Civil Liberties Union of Northern California.
Even those wrongfully convicted and made into symbols for repealing the death penalty have switched tactics to cite the social benefits of commutation.
"Weighing the need for the death penalty with our other needs -- police, firemen, teachers -- I think the balance should go on the side of the community," said Tom Goldstein, an Orange County man who spent 24 years in prison for a murder he didn't commit.
Still, arguments persist for retaining execution as a sentencing option.
A study this year by the Criminal Justice Legal Foundation suggested that the savings from commuting death sentences may be elusive, and that prosecutors may have a harder time getting plea bargains in murder cases if the possibility of death is off the table.
"In states where the death penalty is the maximum punishment, a larger number of murder defendants are willing to plead guilty and receive a life sentence," said Kent Scheidegger, legal director for the Sacramento-based foundation.
District attorneys, however, already appear to be seeking the death penalty less often. The number of death sentences in the state has fallen by half over the last decade, from 42 in 1999 to 18 last year.
Nationally, the numbers have fallen even more sharply, from 328 in 1994 to 111 last year.
California's distinction of housing the nation's largest death row yet accounting for only 13 of the 1,168 executions in the country since 1976 demonstrates the state's ambivalence about capital punishment, said Mark Drozdowski, a deputy federal public defender who heads the Los Angeles capital case unit.
