Death Penalty

Taxpayers have spent more than $4 billion on capital punishment in California since it was reinstated in 1978, or about $308 million for each of the 13 executions carried out since then, according to a comprehensive analysis of the death penalty's costs. The examination of state, federal and local expenditures for capital cases, conducted over three years by a senior federal judge and a law professor, estimated that the additional costs of capital trials, enhanced security on death row and legal representation for the condemned adds $184 million to the budget each year.

A 23-year-old gang member who shot and killed a high school football star he mistook for a rival gangster in 2008 should be put to death, a Los Angeles jury decided Wednesday. Jurors reached the verdict after about a week of testimony in the penalty phase of the trial for Pedro Espinoza, a member of the 18th Street gang. The panel was asked to decide what punishment Espinoza should receive for the slaying of 17-year-old Jamiel Shaw II. Prosecutors said Shaw was killed execution-style because he was a young black male carrying a red Spider-Man backpack, which led Espinoza to believe he was a Bloods gang member.

California is set for a major debate on the death penalty following qualification Monday of a November ballot measure that would replace capital punishment with a life term without possibility of parole. If passed, the measure would make California the 18th state in the nation without a death penalty. During the last five years, four states have replaced the death penalty and Connecticut is soon to follow. Growing numbers of conservatives in California have joined the effort to repeal the state's capital punishment law, expressing frustration with its price tag and the rarity of executions.

Hours after accused serial killer Itzcoatl Ocampo allegedly stabbed a homeless man to death in an Anaheim parking lot, he was interviewed by a veteran detective. When Ocampo was asked what sort of consequences he deserved, the 23-year-old answered without hesitation: the death penalty - lethal injection - or "whatever is quickest," the detective, Daron Wyatt, later told a grand jury panel. On Monday, Orange County Dist. Atty. Tony Rackauckas said his office had come to the same conclusion and announced that he would seek the death penalty against the former Marine.

This page has a long history of opposing the death penalty. As far back as 1971, before the alternative sentence of life without the possibility of parole had been devised, we were pining for such a choice. If there were a way to ensure that convicted killers would remain in prison for life, a member of The Times' editorial board wrote during the Nixon administration, "would it not be better to forgo, in some humility about the limitations of human judgment, the imposition of the ultimate punishment?

A Riverside police officer pleaded for his life before he was fatally shot by a state prison parolee who had led the patrolmen on a high-speed pursuit and foot chase last week, the Riverside County district attorney said Monday. Dist. Atty. Rod Pacheco on Monday filed a first-degree murder charge against Earl Ellis Green, 44, for the "assassination" of the 27-year-old officer. The prosecutor said his office is weighing whether to seek the death penalty. Officer Ryan Bonaminio was chasing Green through the city's Fairmount Park when he slipped and fell and, while in a "vulnerable position," he was attacked by Green and had his gun taken away, Police Chief Sergio Diaz said.

As a child, Heath Wilkins liked to set fires and break into houses looking for knives and money. He plotted to poison his mother when he was 10, and at 16 he stabbed a convenience store clerk to death as she begged for her life. Kevin Stanford plunged into crime at age 9. He was a drug addict at 12 and was arrested for robbery, burglary, assault, attempted rape and other crimes by 17. That's when he raped, robbed and murdered a gas station attendant.

As hired killers slit Pamela Fayed's throat in a Century City parking garage, her "bloodcurdling" screams echoed throughout the structure. Bystanders turned their heads in the direction of the horrific attack, footage from security cameras shows. The only person within earshot who didn't react was the victim's estranged husband who was sitting on a nearby bench "texting on his cellphone, like he doesn't have a care in the world," Los Angeles County Superior Court Judge Kathleen Kennedy said Thursday, moments before sentencing James Fayed to death for the contract killing.

On the September night that the state of Georgia put Troy Davis to death, a crowd of several hundred gathered at the Supreme Court in Washington to protest America's continued practice of capital punishment. But they were in the wrong place. The protesters should have assembled 600 miles southeast, in Atlanta. The Constitution does not empower the Supreme Court to proscribe capital punishment or to regulate it out of existence, and those who ignore that point have made it increasingly expensive and less effective.

As the sun rose Friday behind the Northern Ridge near here and the 6 a.m. bell pealed at nearby St. Mary's College, the trapdoor snapped open beneath Dole Chadee's feet in the State Prison gallows room. Trinidad's most notorious murderer, drug lord and gang leader had been hanged. Joey Ramiah was the next to die. And then, at 8:44 a.m., it was Ramkalawan Singh's turn.

Carlos DeLuna was, in all likelihood, murdered by the state of Texas on Dec. 7, 1989. It's hard to come to any other conclusion after reading an exhaustive analysis of his case published online by a Columbia law school professor and his students. And he may not be the only innocent death row inmate executed by that notably bloodthirsty state. Cameron Todd Willingham, a man whose conviction for setting a fire that killed his three young daughters was based on spectacularly shoddy forensics work, was injected with a death cocktail on Feb. 17, 2004.

Alan Jackson is, at 46, the youngest of the six candidates for Los Angeles County district attorney. But he's tried his share of high-profile cases, including the successful prosecution of music icon Phil Spector, and that in turn has helped to elevate his profile. For name recognition he can't match Los Angeles City Atty.  Carmen Trutanich, and some voters may still confuse him with the country music star of the same name, but Jackson has worked hard to distinguish himself from the rest of the pack.

DALLAS - On the way to witness his first execution in the town known as the "Execution Capital of the World," the Dallas County district attorney stopped at the prison cemetery to find his great-grandfather's grave. Captain Joe Byrd Cemetery in Huntsville is the final resting place of inmates whose families could not afford burial anywhere else. Tall pines guard the grassy expanse nicknamed "Peckerwood Hill," where many gravestones bear prison identification numbers, not names.

U.S. NAVAL BASE, GUANTANAMO BAY, CUBA -- Cliff Russell lost his brother, a fireman who rushed to the first tower that was hit. Tara Henwood Butzbaugh lost her brother too, a bond trader on the 105thfloor of the same tower. For more than 10 years they have waited for this. “I wish the worst possible death for them,” Russell said, speaking on the eve of the opening in the military commission trial for the five top ringleaders in the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.  Butzbaugh could not agree more.

A shooting rampage that left eight people dead at a Seal Beach beauty salon last year was so emotionally wrenching to residents in the small beach town that prosecutors say they'll use that as part of their argument that the accused killer deserves the death penalty. In court papers filed this week, prosecutors said that if former tugboat crewman Scott Dekraai is convicted in the slayings, they will present victim impact evidence on behalf of the entire city to show that the midday shooting had a lasting effect on the tight-knit community.

Five of six candidates running for Los Angeles County district attorney squared off Wednesday at a forum hosted by The Times, with several outlining visions for the office that go beyond imprisoning hardened criminals to include reform of the justice system. The candidates' forum - the first attended by City Atty. Carmen Trutanich, who leads the pack in fundraising - saw barbs traded over government transparency, prosecutor morale and whether California should end capital punishment.

'Remanded" -- taken into custody. In his career as a New York prosecutor and a federal prosecutor in California, Donald Heller has asked the court to remand guilty defendants countless times. He helped put away Lynette "Squeaky" Fromme, who tried to assassinate President Gerald Ford, and a big-time heroin dealer, a man Heller believed destroyed many lives. At the dealer's sentencing hearing, the prosecutor remarked that were the death penalty an option, he would volunteer to "throw the switch.

Nearly 50 years ago, as concern grew in the country about the fairness of death penalty laws, the American Law Institute published a "model statute" aimed at helping state lawmakers draft laws to ensure that death sentences were meted out fairly and consistently. Last fall, the institute withdrew its support for the model death penalty law. The decision was a striking repudiation from the very organization that provided the blueprint for death penalty laws in this country. The institute, with a membership of more than 4,000 lawyers, judges and law professors of the highest qualifications, is the leading independent organization in the United States producing scholarly work to clarify and improve the law. In the decade after the institute published its law, which was part of a comprehensive model penal code, the statute became the prototype for death penalty laws across the United States.

Earl Ellis Green shot and killed Riverside police Officer Ryan P. Bonaminio on a chilly night in a church parking lot in November 2010 — that much will not be disputed in the trial that opened Monday in Riverside. "Earl Ellis Green murdered Officer Bonaminio," defense attorney Gail O'Rane told the jury, moments after prosecutor Michael Hestrin laid out a chilling account of the officer's final moments. The slaying, O'Rane argued, was not premeditated, and does not merit a first-degree murder charge that carries a potential death penalty, which is being sought by prosecutors.

Gov. Jerry Brown has ordered prison officials to consider a single-drug method of executing condemned inmates as the state appeals a court order that has blocked California from carrying out the death penalty. Mention of the directive came in a notice of appeal filed Thursday by Atty. Gen. Kamala D. Harris seeking to counter a February ruling that halted a revised three-drug lethal injection method. The filing came just three days after certification of a November ballot measure that would offer voters the chance to repeal California's death penalty.